“Thankfully not, we went away to Miami and lay on the beech getting slowly sizzled, so even if I brought the outline with me I wouldn’t have read it.”
John was doodling as he always did when on the phone. Normally it would be triangular buildings or geometric insects; today it was spirals, lots and lots of spirals. Even subconsciously he was thinking about magnetic fields.
“Well, you know how we were just going to gather interstellar water, but it wouldn’t be really effective until the ship reached high speed? Well, there may be a way of gathering more fuel earlier so we can reach maximum velocity as soon as we get past Neptune, and it’s clever, very clever Graham, it solves two of our problems at once. I’ve asked NASA to run more accurate simulations, they are due on Tuesday, so I want to present both proposals next Friday. The original, which is based on mounting three reactors on the back of the ship and this alternative, which will have four reactors, but will require extra magnetic field generators, perhaps another eight months work for the miners, but it will cut ten years minimum off the journey time, maybe more if we can find a way of compensating for the acceleration and deceleration delays.”
Graham coughed again at the other end of the line, a long cough. John waited a few second for the wheezing to end.
“Graham, have you been to the doctor? I don’t want a repeat of the time you had that foot infection and you didn’t go the doctor for three weeks.”
“Oh shut up, you’re worse than Theresa, yes I went. I’m fine. You know the financial committee won’t like this. Do you have enough data to justify it?”
“Not yet, no. Can you check it with the mining team, see what they think? If they say no, then we should say no, but cutting years off the trip is too big a prize to sacrifice if it does work.”
“That sounds like a plan, no problem from my side, I have a conference call tomorrow with the mining Project Managers so I’ll mention it to them, I’ll send over both proposals to them next Friday as soon as I get them from you….make sure to give your team a few days off afterwards!”
“Oh I will don’t worry, they are doing me proud as always.”
“Also, can you ask for new models for how the repositioning of the field generators will affect the radiation shielding?”
“Sure thing Graham, I have the first results of the model, and according to them these modifications should enhance the shielding and it and make use of it. You’ve seen the interstellar medium calculations right? Of the matter present it’s 89% Hydrogen, about a million molecules per cm3 at rest, but when the Zheng He is travelling at 10% of the speed of light that increases significantly. We can use the magnetic field generated by the ship to direct charged hydrogen into the collectors, it can provide us with extra fusion material.”
“Can it really cut ten years off the trip?”
“Well, we will have that confirmed in a couple of days, ten years might not seem like much off when we were looking at it lasting two hundred and twenty, but if we can get it working as efficiently as possible, maybe it could cut as much as fifty years off it.”
“You sound excited John, be careful though, our job is to get the thing built so it takes off in 2061. It’s not our responsibility what speed it goes at. That said, I’ll wait and see what NASA think, it is better for us if a change like this can be factored in now, while the mining engineers are still up there. Fifty years, if the price is right, could be worth it. You have until Friday.”
“Thanks Graham. Is there anything else while you have me?”
Graham hesitated. “John, did you receive any strange letters recently?”
“No, well, one or two from some pushy businesses who want to be our suppliers, but that’s pretty regular, I treat it as spam. Why, what are you getting?”
“The same, which as you say is normal, except, oh I don’t know, it’s probably nothing, but there are a few companies putting a lot of pressure on me, one even came to the office unannounced.”
“Do you want me to handle them for you? Did he offer you anything?”
“That’s just it, he did, he offered me a pretty substantial sum of money, about $100,000 if I promote our use of his company. I told him to stuff it and reported it to the auditors, but I’m worried by this, I know our contracts are valuable, but there is oversight. What if others are being bribed though?”
“Well, Laure won’t like it for one thing. We should keep a list of these companies, extra attention should be paid to their tenders, in fact they should be excluded from the process entirely. I’ll ask Sophie, when she’s back at work, if there’s some way we can report them, or set something up.”
“Thanks John, I know you and Sophie try not to talk about work, this could be good for us all though. The way this guy spoke to me, I felt threatened more than anything else. I’m sure the political and admin people can get it sorted.”
“And we have enough to deal with ourselves anyway. Speaking of which, I’d better give the team a call and let them know we have until Friday, and to take the night off. Chat to you later in the week so?”
Graham was starting to cough again but he forced out his goodbye; “sure….see you….see you soon John…bye.”
John put down the receiver. That cough really had him worried. Graham would normally go on sick leave for a few days if he was that ill, but instead he was back at work. He decided he’d give Graham’s wife Theresa a call tomorrow; she might be able to talk him into taking time off.
#
John and Sophie had planned two weeks’ vacation next Christmas and they counted the days as though they were waiting for Santa Claus. Graham‘s health didn’t improve, in fact it got worse, but he kept working at a frantic pace, until his body kicked in and made him stop. He was in France when it happened, on a site visit with some potential investors. Graham wouldn’t normally show investors around, they had pubic relations people for that, but these investors would be paying a significant amount towards the construction of the agricultural infrastructure; the farms and forests on board, over three billion dollars in fact, and they wanted to speak to the technical people before they invested a cent. They couldn’t take them up to see the work going on in orbit, but they could take them to see John’s work. They had built a life-sized model of how one of the engines might look, more or less, so the industrial giants of mining, computing and energy production could come and see what their investment would yield. For John, the money from energy production was pouring in. While ITER had made fusion possible, what John was working on would make it practical, they were learning a lot about how to maximise yield while minimising size. The model was still pretty impressive though.
It happened for no immediate reason, no fright or physical exertion. Graham was just walking to the toilet when the pain shot up his arm and across his chest. At 71 he was aware of what a heart attack should feel like, though being aware didn’t make it any less painful. He remembered falling, he remembered the simultaneous pain of his heart convulsing and the pain as his head hit the floor, and he remembered the confusion as he came around, hearing monitors beeping around him. Theresa was there when Graham woke up, with John and Sophie. It didn’t matter that there was an audience; Theresa hugged her husband, told him how much she loved him and how mad with worry she had been, and then proceeded to shout at her beloved for being a pig ignorant fool who always put his work before his health. She poked him hard in the shoulder as she explained how she had found out he had lied about visiting their doctor for tests, and then hugged him again. It had been a pretty big heart attack and Graham would be out of action for at least several weeks. The drugs had Graham exhausted, about an hour after he regained consciousness they were ushered out of the room so he could sleep some more. Theresa looked so relieved and hugged John, “thank you dear, It means so much that you were here, you know he thinks of you as being practically one of our sons, speaking of which I should call our kids, they don’t know what happened yet.”
“Do you want to use my phone?” offe
red Sophie “It’s paid for by my work so you don’t have to worry if you need to spend longer chatting.”
“Thank you Sophie, they won’t talk for long, but just in case yes please.”
“Anything Theresa, we’re here for you. We’ll pop downstairs to the restaurant for a coffee do you want us to bring you back a sandwich or anything?”
“No dears, I couldn’t yet, I still have butterflies in my stomach, maybe later. You go get some coffee you both look like you’re about to fall asleep in front of me”.
Indeed they were tired. While Theresa made her calls they took the lift down one floor to the hospital café. Like all hospital cafés it mainly served bags of sweets, puzzle books, chewing gum, triangular packs of sandwiches and coffee so hot it must have been made by the devil himself. As they stood at the little aluminium table, waiting for their coffee to cool, Sophie reached across and squeezed John’s hand.
“There’s something I need to tell you, it’s about work, our work.”
John looked at her “no work talk when we’re together.”
Sophie shook her head “not this time hun, I asked Laure months ago if I could tell you what’s happening. She said no, not until you needed to know. She sent me a message thirty minutes ago saying you need to know”.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to accuse you of keeping secrets” he grinned at her “I wouldn’t have let you speak about work anyway. So what sort of plot has Madame Dubois gotten you involved in that you couldn’t tell me about it? And what has it to do with Graham being sick?”
“Well, with Graham being sick, that should be pretty obvious; you will be taking over his work won’t you?”
This give John a bit of a start, his friend was upstairs recovering from a heart attack, and his fiancée was trying to push him into his job, “Come off it Sophie, it’s only just happened, I’m sure he’ll be back on his feet in no time. If this is about me taking his job, well I don’t feel comfortable talking about it.”
“I’m afraid you have to hun. He’s getting older, and this is going to make him reassess a lot of things in his life. Most members of the UN committee want you to automatically take over Graham’s work when he retires, it would mean a smooth continuity from him to you, and you have already proven yourself with the fusion engines, they are way ahead of schedule.”
“Can we at least wait a couple of days?”
“Sure, but you will be filling in for him while he is sick won’t you?”
“Probably, well, yes I suppose so, what choice do I have?”
“There you go then, that’s why I need to talk to you about what’s happening on the political level. You’re about to walk onto shifting soil, I love you John, I want to make sure you’re safe and the best way for me to keep you safe is to keep you prepared.”
“What do you mean safe?”
Sophie’s shoulders fell, “I wanted to warn you but I couldn’t, I’m sorry. The companies Graham said were hassling him, we have friends who have been keeping an eye them for some time. John, they have links to some pretty nasty stuff, and from what our friends have learned, they are getting pretty impatient with all of us for not contracting them.”
“Who are these ‘friends’ who seem to know so much?”
“Laure won’t tell me, but I’ve seen the documentation on the companies they have warned us about. They’ve scuppered their competitors projects in the past through massive undercharging which hints that they have access to a lot of financial backing that they don’t declare; they’ll do it again if they can to get involved with the Zheng He. They’ve powerful political connections as well. We’re going to fight them off, but there will probably be some sort of backlash.”
John stared at her open mouthed. When Sophie said she had something to tell him he had instantly thought the worst- she was sick, or moving away or even breaking up with him- but he realised that wasn’t the worst. The worst was that he didn’t know this woman standing before him. His Sophie, always so stubborn and clever, yet graceful and beautiful too, how could his Sophie be involved in something shady and potentially dangerous like this?
“By backlash you mean something violent don’t you?”
“Yes, but don’t worry, Laure says we are all well protected. I don’t know by whom, maybe it’s Interpol or someone, but she says these companies or gangs or whatever don’t know that we know what they are, we have the upper hand.”
“Gangs! Christ! Oh fine, everything’s ok because Laure says so! You can’t just tell me someone is out to get us and then, by magic, it will all be ok because Laure bloody Dubois says it will be.”
“Keep your voice down….look, we’re compiling information so we can go after them, we need to catch the politicians they’re associated with at the same time. Nothing will happen, the Project comes first.”
“The Project always comes first. It came before Graham’s health, it came between him and Theresa, it is coming between us.”
“Oh don’t be a drama queen, we’re fine John, I know you love me and I certainly love you. But the project does come first; you know that as well as I do.”
Sophie had never called John a drama queen, in fact John was known to be the more level headed of the too, it was unusual for him to get so het up. He looked at her scowling face; she looked so silly when she got angry, like a little girl who didn’t get the dress she wanted. He smiled. “I’m a drama queen? Don’t start arguments you can’t win. So what am I to do then?”
“Nothing hun, except wait and hope it can all be sorted out.”
Chapter 7: 2038
Paul Jansson was nearing the end of his latest six month shift on the Zheng He. He worked six months on and twelve months off. He remembered the last time he returned home, wobbly legs for a month, but with the right diet and exercise he had recovered fully before his next trip up. The microgravity caused by the mass of the Zheng He didn’t help much, it was negligible. In two weeks he would be back on Earth, and once again he would have lower bone density, less muscle mass and low blood pressure to deal with. For now though he munched on his breakfast as he looked out on the best view any worker could ever wish for. The thin blue haze of the Earth’s upper atmosphere hung as an aura of calm over central Africa. He wondered if people down there were looking up at him, they probably were. Once the wonder of childhood has passed no one looks up at the moon, but everyone looked up at the Zheng He as it glided softly across the sky. It was new, it was wondrous, it was even terrifying. Some people still lived with the feeling it could suddenly fall on them, psychologists even had a name for it; “Zhenghephobia.” The only way it could fall from the sky would be if the boosters misfired catastrophically and let it drop from orbit. Paul preferred not to think about that since they were clinging to its surface he and his colleagues had concluded that it wouldn’t be a nice thing to happen at all. The project public relations people had done a good job convincing most of the general public that the unlikelihood of such an accident meant there was nothing whatsoever to concern them. Still though, human nature can’t help but fear the new and unfamiliar.
It wasn’t just the view, the adventure, and the time off that made this a great job; the pay was pretty good too. They had spent over a year practicing their mining techniques for outer space. When you are blasting rock in almost zero gravity there are a few things you need to watch out for; debris doesn’t slow down, debris doesn’t fall on the ground, and if you let that debris drift into space then when you meet it again in orbit in a month, a year or in 10 years, it can still kill you. The good pay was because this was the most dangerous part of the construction process. In the first weeks they drilled manually, which was slow going, but once the geologists were happy they began blasting. The shaped charges made sure most of the energy went into the rock they wanted to fracture, but still some would blast outwards so the site was covered by an aluminium dome to make sure nothing would escape outwards and kill them. Just like an umbrella it closed up after the blast to gather the floating
dust and debris while Paul and his colleagues went in with scoops and nets to remove the shattered rock and store it for return to Earth. While blasting sped up the work, it was still slow. On Earth when you push a shovel into dirt the shovel tends not to push you back so much. After about two months they had dug the entry shaft, about 100 metres long and 10 meters wide. The tunnel drill, which some of the engineers had been assembling bit by bit, was ready to go, and so the mouth of the entry shaft was sealed and the space inside was pressurised. Paul remembered that day well. Health and safety meant they still had to work in their suits, just in case of a sudden breech, but they all felt a little relieved that the chances of instant death by space had dropped somewhat.
It was still dangerous work and awkward with no gravity. It would be a few more years until the Zheng He would put into a spin to generate artificial gravity internally, the engines would need to be fitted before that could happen. For now though there was plenty to do before they would be finished on the surface, there was a measurement mistake with some of the magnetic field generators, it was going to take an extra month to get that fixed. Luckily more trained miners had been brought up to deal with that, Paul himself had trained some of them on his last period of leave and they had impressed him. When working on the surface they didn’t have the luxury of a pressurised environment. Paul finished off his breakfast, suited up and performed his checks, and went through the airlock with his colleagues for today’s shift. Since there was no real night or day they had alpha and beta shifts instead, but there was some syncing with control in Eindhoven back on Earth. Down there they still had night and day and the shifts that corresponded with it.
Their shift, the alpha shift, had a special duty to perform before they began work. Paul carried a bundle of small canisters with him and a drill. For $100,000 the dead, or at least a piece of them could hitch a ride to Gliese 451 beneath the surface of the Zheng He. The canisters contained some of the ashes of the “lucky” few millionaire space enthusiasts who died last week and had a few grams of their remains flown up with the latest delivery of drill bits and food rations. It was a clever PR stunt admittedly, and covered the cost of one or two payloads a year, though it was a drop in the ocean of the overall budget for the mining project. Today’s bundle had one special guest though; canister 447A contained 10 grams of Graham Hutchinson, former Project Manager for the Zheng He mission. He’d had a second heart attack 4 years earlier which had forced him into retirement. Paul vaguely remembered meeting him once in a briefing before his first trip up, he had seemed a nice enough guy though he didn’t quite get his jokes. John Peeters, who had been the project manager since then was a little more hands on with the mining team, Paul had been in group video conferences a few times with him and liked his directness.
The Project Manager Page 7