Boundary

by Eric Flint

Her slender, tanned hand locked around his wrist and pulled him back down.

  "Oh no, you don't, Mr. Baker." Her voice was a soft growl. Nothing at all like the even tone he was used to hearing.

  "A.J., I don't . . ." She took a deep, slow breath. "Oh, baloney. I know exactly what to say. The truth is that I've always found you extremely attractive. It's just that I figured the age gap made for an insuperable barrier and so I shoved the notion out of my mind. I've kept it in a box under a tight lid for . . . what's it been? Two and half years, now."

  Throughout, she'd still been looking aside. Now, her eyes came to meet his directly.

  "I take it you don't find my age a problem?"

  He started to make a wisecrack, but the same drill sergeant portion of his brain made the smartass do two thousand pushups in. . .

  One second.

  "No. Actually, it's . . . Well, to be honest, I think it's part of the attraction."

  Seeing her cocked eyebrow, he sighed. "Look, Helen, I'm not stupid. I know I often act like a jerk. I don't even mean to, really. Well, not most of the time, anyway. It's just . . . I don't know. Defense mechanism. Whatever. But it never seems to bother you and I figured out a long time ago that's because you're old enough that you just don't care about stuff like that any more. If you ever did at all. So I can relax around you in a way that I almost never can around women my own age, unless they're just good buddies like Jackie."

  He swallowed again. "And that's important to me. The thing is, no matter how much I act like the opposite—and it's mostly all talk—the truth is that I'm not a very casual person at all. No matter how I act. Not really about anything, and sure as hell not about, uh, well . . ."

  "Sex. Love. Romance." The cool, relaxed, mature smile that A.J. treasured came to her face. "In whatever order," she added, waving her other hand breezily. Her right hand was still clamped around A.J.'s wrist.

  "What the hell," she said, suddenly rising to her feet and half-dragging A.J. up from his chair. "Let's start with sex. And we'll see where it goes from there."

  Their departure from the room did not go unnoticed. Joe and Jackie had followed the progress of the discussion between A.J. and Helen almost from the moment it began. They were sitting too far away to have heard any of the words. But the facial expressions and body language had made the subject matter obvious enough—even before Helen more or less hauled A.J. away. Not that he seemed in the least unwilling.

  Joe drained his glass and set it down on the table with a solid thunk. "Well. It's about time, if anybody asks me."

  For her part, Jackie bestowed a triumphant grin upon the other people at the table. "See?" she demanded. "I told you he wasn't my boyfriend."

  Chapter 27

  Dr. Glendale, is it true that you will not be going on Nike yourself?"

  "Dr. Glendale, is this mission really necessary?"

  "Dr. Glendale, please tell us about the latest results! I understand progress is being made in translating the aliens' language!"

  "Dr. Glendale—"

  He raised his hands, flashing the smile he knew worked so well on camera. "Please, one at a time. This isn't my first press conference, even for this particular mission, and I know for sure it isn't yours."

  "However," said Paul Morgan, "this is the first conference since any of the more concrete plans for Nike and her crew have been released. NASA's usually much more forthcoming than this, Doctor."

  Morgan was the senior news correspondent present. There'd be no point in trying to evade him, even if Glendale wanted to.

  "True enough, Paul. And please, everyone, call me Nick or Nicholas. I've been 'Doctor Glendaled' too much lately."

  A patter of chuckles rippled through the large group of reporters.

  "I know that all of you, especially the long-time space correspondents, are used to getting much better treatment. But there are all sorts of considerations ranging from national security to simple logistics that are involved here. To be frank, even I'm being kept busy enough that it's a bit of a stretch to take time and give interviews. And I'm by far the most superfluous person here."

  He waved them into their chairs with a practiced gesture. "Before we go any further, though, would you please take your seats? Trying to answer questions from a mob of people standing around me is too much like being grilled by the police. I think. I've never actually been grilled by the police. But I am an expert on ancient predators. The velociraptors were pack hunters, you know. Surrounded their prey and tore them to shreds. Horrible business. Blood and guts everywhere."

  That drew a louder round of chuckles, and the reporters started sitting down. Glendale was quite aware of his ability to "work" a group of people and guide them along the course he needed them to take, and was equally aware that this talent was one of the reasons he was now being the "front man" for the Nike project.

  "Doc . . . er, Nicholas, tell me straight out: is this mission really necessary? And if it is, is the sheer scale of it necessary?" That came from Jake McNeil, a reporter for the generally antispace AccuNews Network.

  "Jake, such a hard-hitting question right out of the gate? Aren't you supposed to soften me up first?" Smiling, Glendale shook his head. "Why don't we get a bit more specific than that. Bring up the points of the mission that actually bother you—or, I suppose, bother your viewers, to be more accurate."

  Privately, he doubted that the viewers of any given network thought any more alike than any other. But it was a common enough conceit that he'd use it as convenient.

  "All right. We're getting tons of data already from Mr. Baker's probes. Why do we need to risk fifty people—fifty of our very best people, from all over the world—just to do what the probes can do perfectly well by themselves?"

  "Unfortunately, Jake, your last clause makes an assumption I'm not willing to grant you. In fact, it's patently untrue. The probes are simply too limited. They're physically too small; unintelligent by themselves; limited in their equipment; and, most of all, incapable of adjusting themselves to new situations the way a human being can as a matter of course. A four-year-old child—for that matter, a toddler— can figure out in a split second how to get around an obstacle that will completely stump an automated probe if it's not specifically programmed to deal with it. And it can then take hours—days—before we can satisfactorily reprogram it from a distance.

  "Certainly we could send more automated probes, but even today we simply do not have automated devices capable of the work that human beings can do in person. People like Helen Sutter and myself have careers for a reason, you know. It's simply not possible for an automated machine, even here on Earth, to perform a paleontological excavation, or to unearth an ancient artifact without damaging it. We use such tools, but in the end, it's still down to what we as human beings can manage to do. And this mission is the single greatest event in the history of the human race, in my opinion. We are performing what amounts to both a paleontological and an archaeological dig of an utterly unique character. We cannot afford to screw this one up, to put it bluntly. We need living, intelligent people on the spot, and we need them to be experts in many fields. Why? Because we haven't the faintest idea of what we might turn up while exploring what appears to be a truly immense installation."

  "Are you saying," Paul Morgan asked, "that the alien base is even larger than you originally thought?"

  "Yes, Paul. Another corridor was found behind one of the remaining doors being investigated, and some of Mr. Baker's sensor work shows indications of . . . Well, a lot more 'stuff' for us to find. Our current thinking is that this base is the size of a moderately large military installation—which means that even with fifty people on site it could take years to explore thoroughly. Probably will, I should say, if we take any care at all in our investigations."

  "Years?" Michelle Wright of MSNBC spoke up. "Is that possible to do, Nicholas?"

  "Oh, yes. We are already in the process of devising a schedule of resupply and replacement flights. We should be able to k
eep the Phobos operation supplied for several years, at least. That includes people being shuttled to and from the Earth."

  "This brings us back to the question of necessity and potential waste, Nick," Jake said. "All right, I'll swallow that you've got to have people on-site. I agree that no machine can do as good a job as a person in any situation that requires flexibility. But look at the size of Nike now. I'm not even sure we can build something that huge in space, let alone that we should."

  "She is pretty large, I'll grant you—about four hundred and thirty meters long, and the habitat ring is almost three hundred meters across. But the diameter of that habitat ring is necessary."

  "Why?"

  Glendale wondered if McNeil was really that ignorant of basic scientific concepts. But whether or not he was, the question served nicely to make an explanation to the general public that wouldn't sound patronizing.

  "You all understand, I'm sure, that we can't send people on such a months-long voyage through space under weightlessness." He waited just long enough for a little wave of nods from about half the reporters present. "People did not evolve in null-gravity or micro-gravity conditions. We need a certain amount of gravity to keep our bone structure from deteriorating, and prevent all the other problems that years of research on microgravity have shown us turn up in people who spend too much time weightless. And, alas"—here he smiled wryly—"we do not have any of the methods of generating artificial gravity that the movie industry does. So, the only method we can use is to spin the ship and substitute centrifugal force for gravity."

  "I understand all that," McNeil said impatiently. "All the more reason, it seems to me, to use a small ship. It'd be easier to spin."

  Glendale gave him that long, level stare that he'd perfected over the decades. First, on bumptious grad students; later, on even more bumptious reporters. It was a stare that managed to convey, without being precisely rude, that Glendale was momentarily stumped because the question was so inane that he had to grope to remember the answer. As if someone had asked him, Dr. Glendale, how should one tie one's shoes?

  "Indeed." He cleared his throat. "Let me respond with a question of my own—addressed everyone here. How many of you like going to amusement parks?"

  Hesitantly, there was a show of hands.

  "Any of you dislike the rides? Like the teacup ones, or the rotor, or other spinning ones? Any of you really hate them?"

  A number of the hands stayed up. Glendale nodded. "That's a pretty typical response. As it turns out, there's a sizable percentage of the human race that will get quite disoriented in something that spins faster than, oh, about two or three times a minute—let alone once every second or two. Now, as anyone who's been on those rides knows, how much force spin puts on you is directly related to how fast the thing spins and how far out from the center you are. If you want to have a given centrifugal force—say, equivalent to Mars' gravity of about one-third Earth's—and you want to rotate slowly—less than three times a minute—you have to be a very considerable distance out from the center. About one hundred and forty-six meters out, to be reasonably exact. If you wanted Earth-level gravity, well, you do the math. A lot farther out, meaning a lot larger ring. Luckily for us, experiments indicate that one-third gravity should be enough to prevent the problems."

  "But even granting that width as necessary, what about the rest of the ship?" asked another reporter.

  "Well, a good deal of the interior of the main body is fuel storage. Remember, there are no filling stations along the way. Nike has an unfueled weight of almost two thousand tons—but she'll weigh almost eight thousand tons when we top off her tanks. The rest of the main body will have some considerable extra space, but who knows what she might be asked to carry once she reaches Phobos? And she will, of course, be carrying provisions for each person on board— which is quite a few tons per person, if you calculate it out. Not to mention scientific equipment of virtually every possible description, an SSTO lander—"

  "A what lander?" That came from someone who was obviously not one of the regular correspondents.

  "Sorry. 'SSTO' stands for 'single stage to orbit.' It refers to a lander that will be able to land on Mars with a mostly unpowered approach, and then take off back to orbit on its own, without needing a base station. Then, we have to carry construction equipment and supplies for making base areas on Phobos itself. And so on and so on and so on. You always need to remember that when you're a hundred million miles from Earth, you can't just send someone out to the nearest hardware store to get you that screwdriver you forgot to bring along. And these people will be out there for a year, at least, before they rotate back to Earth."

  He fielded another question, from someone else.

  After the reporter was done, Glendale shook his head. "Calling it a 'translation' is too strong a term. Our linguists are still not able to decipher the actual words of the alien language. But they are making progress in grasping how they wrote their language and some of its basic structure. To put it another way, they don't understand what the words mean, but they can now tell what's a word in the first place. According to Dr. Mayhew . . ."

  PART V: NIKE

  Insight, n: a clear and often sudden

  understanding of a situation; often in the context of

  reaching a comprehension or solution to a problem

  which had previously appeared insoluble.

  Chapter 28

  "Getting on close to two years, now," the director of the HIA mused, staring out the window. "I will say that this has been the smoothest operation you've ever run, Madeline."

  She issued something that was a cross between a ladylike sniff of disdain and an outright snort. "That's because I'm working with a much higher class of clientele, so to speak. Compared to the usual run of lowlifes you stick me with."

  He smiled, almost seraphically, and swiveled his chair back to face her. "I'm sure there's some saying regarding promises and rose gardens that applies here."

  "It's helped—a great deal, I think—that A.J. Baker got involved with Helen Sutter."

  Hughes cocked an eyebrow, inviting an elaboration.

  "Helen's . . . Well, she's not happy about the security restrictions. Hard to blame her, since that's not something she's ever had to deal with in her profession. But she's a very level-headed sort of person, and I think she views the matter as not much different from the sort of practical limitations she's always faced. We're talking about a woman who'd make a damn good construction site foreman, if she ever had to start a new career."

  Hughes grinned. "Is she still level-headed, after the blizzard of tabloid coverage?"

  Madeline chuckled. "Oh, that's water off her back. She wouldn't pay any attention to it of any kind, if she didn't have to deal with the paparazzi. More precisely, if she didn't have to deal with Baker's reaction to them."

  That brought an outright laugh from the director. A.J. Baker's scrapes with the paparazzi had become notorious. "But you think she's a good influence on him?"

  "Certainly from our standpoint," Madeline replied. "Helen acts something like a coolant on a reactor, when it comes to A.J.'s public behavior. Well, leaving aside the paparazzi. Ever since they hooked up, I've had far fewer run-ins with him."

  Hughes nodded. "Yes, I can see where she'd have that effect on the rambunctious young fellow. Part of the attraction she has for him, I imagine. I admit I can't quite figure out the flip side of that relationship."

  "Why she's attracted to him?" Madeline shrugged. "I don't think that's hard to understand at all. Don't forget that almost all you ever hear about Baker from me are his . . . call them problem sides. But there are other things about the man—quite a few other things—that are very charming. I think that's especially important for someone like Helen, who's led a rather tightly regimented life because of the demands of her profession."

  Hughes grunted softly. "Well. That's really none of our business, anyway. It's enough that she seems to have stifled his more anarchistic tende
ncies."

  He sat up straight in his chair, placing his hands on the desk. "And . . . So. You'll be taking off day after tomorrow. Any last-minute issues we need to discuss?"