The Project Manager

by Terry Connolly

  The vibrations in his feet changed and shook Paul from his memories. They had reached the target depth of twelve meters. Hans turned off the drill and began to withdraw it. Back on Earth, without water, a drill like this would overheat and break down in a matter of minutes, but up here, the strip of copper running through it kept it connected to the surface, which was around -120C at the moment, they could only drill in the dark. Paul took a deep breath and kneeled beside his toolbox, which was attached to his suit to stop it floating away. Hans was busy looking down into the hole while the robotic rig continued to detach each segment of the drill as it was withdrawn and stored for re-use. Hans would be distracted for only another five minutes or so, after that it was Paul’s job to insert the carbon reinforced cable. Now was his only chance. He carefully pulled back the lid of his toolbox and looked at the block of plastic explosive he had placed in there. As a senior mining engineer he had access to their explosive stores. Attached to it was a detonator, radio controlled, which would be attached to the cable he was about to send down the hole. He didn’t know when it was supposed to go off or who would press the button; all he knew was that he had to place them in the bases of the next five magnets. The ship could function normally with three magnets next to each other out of action, but five so close together would render it useless as shielding. His new brothers, his new friends had asked him to do this. It was holy work they said, and would ensure that if the humans travelling to the new planet were impure, they would never make it there. Only true believers should spread across the universe to populate the new gardens of Eden.

  Paul gently touched the detonator. He believed, he truly did, and when he boarded the shuttle to come on his latest mission he relished the fact that he was doing God’s work. Every night he secretly prayed for strength to carry out his mission. He felt like a spy, a solider of the church, a martyr, a sheep hiding amongst heathen wolves. If Paul had been ordered to detonate explosives on arrival at the Zheng He, or even two weeks later, he would have done it without question. It had taken a month of hole drilling before they got to the specific cables he had to sabotage and in that month those heathen wolves reminded him he could make friends again. Hans in particular had reminded Paul about how much fun zero gravity could be. Now he kneeled there about to potentially destroy their work, his work and perhaps hurt or kill them, his friends.

  If he failed in this mission he had been told not to come back, the church would be closed to him. That had been Leon Braun’s mistake really. Paul was in a dark place and these people had brought him into the light. His mother, all those years ago when was a child had taught him that God’s love was unconditional. At night they would kneel and pray together and now for some reason he thought of her, down there in Germany praying with him, asking god to protect his father in the mines and to forgive others, “forgive them lord for they do not know what they are doing,” he whispered to himself. The people this could kill would not know what they were doing to deserve it, yet his friends in the church below would not forgive him if he failed to kill others. Despite everything that had happened Paul had kept his conscience, he remembered how to tell right from wrong, just as his hardworking parents had taught him. That feeling in his gut told him this was wrong, everything about it was wrong, killing was wrong. He closed the toolbox again and pressed transmit on his radio;

  “Hans, you there?”

  “Yep, what’s up?”

  “Tell Isabel and Jan I love them would you?”

  It’s easy to die in space; you just take a deep breath, unclip your helmet and let your lungs rupture.

  #

  The sadness hadn’t been a problem. It was still there but John could handle it. The emptiness was much harder to deal with. He filled it with work, and with Abby, but it wasn’t enough. When he made a breakthrough on a problem he would pick up his phone to call Sophie, except she wasn’t there. When Abby drew a new picture her maman’s praise was gone. When he went to bed and lay there, just lay there, alone, with all his doubts, there was no one to kiss them away. Thoughts that started out as grief had, night after night, slowly changed from loss to anger to vengeance.

  The waiting area for Ephrem Resources was far too modest to be in the centre of Milan, yet here it was. John sat on the small armless chair watching the dregs of his espresso encrust itself to the walls of the cup. They had clearly not splashed out on furnishing their headquarters, neither had they updated the newspapers on the table beside him, not that it mattered since he didn’t have a word of Italian beyond “ciao”. He was glad of the coffee, it helped wash the taste of bile from his mouth, he had been sick all morning. Two weeks ago Bin arrived at his office in Houston to take him out for lunch. The briefing had been short, he was handed his background story and told what to do, after that they enjoyed some delicious dim sum in a restaurant John had never even noticed before. One week ago a woman arrived at his home, to practice his lines with him. All of this preparation was to make him feel as confident as possible to undertake his task. It worked to a point, one hour ago as he flushed his half-digested breakfast down the hotel toilet he thought all the preparation was in vain, that he was sure to ruin it all and put himself and perhaps his family in danger, but now that he was sitting here in their offices he felt much calmer. He must be calm, they killed Sophie, and if he didn’t pull this off he would never have his revenge.

  A tall man in a suit exited an office at the end of the corridor and walked directly to John. He knew his face, he had googled this man’s name so many times, and in his dreams those long hands were covered in Sophie’s blood. John smiled as warmly as he could and shook one of those blood soaked hands, “Mr Smith, delighted to meet you at last.”

  “John please, call me Harry, I’m not into formalities. It’s great to finally meet the man that is piecing together that lump of rock over our heads. Come this way I hope you had a pleasant flight?”

  “Fine, thank you. It’s also nice to be in Milan with a little free time for once, I haven’t been here for years. You have a great location for your headquarters.”

  “Yes, but we have been in this building since our foundation, it’s a little too small for us now. Naturally I would love to move us all to London, but it would be unfair on the staff to make them up sticks and leave like that.”

  They entered Harry Smith’s office “Here, have a seat.” Harry’s office, like the reception area, was plain and furnished for utility rather than impression. There weren’t many personal affects, or even any paper on the desk, it looked as though Harry Smith just used the Milan office to store some of his golf trophies.

  Harry got the conversation properly under way: “Sorry to hear about that accident this morning, it’s all over the news. Did you know the man?”

  John had received a call that morning to say that a miner, Paul Jansson, had committed suicide. For now they were not releasing Paul’s name to the media to give his family some time to grieve before any press descended on them. To fill in the gap the media had taken it upon themselves to presume it an accident. The public relations people had also advised on silence, at least until the initial investigation was complete, it seems Mr. Jansson may have been contemplating sabotage as he had explosives with him when he died, and they found suspicious notes in a missal he kept in his personal belongings. The last thing they needed was an argument over who had jurisdiction to prosecute on a moon, so an accident seemed to suit everyone just fine for now.

  “I may have met him briefly” said John, “I was involved with the miners during their training, I gave them a three hour presentation on the project, but I don’t know any of them personally. That will be different for the next phase I guess, since I’ll be living with the instillation engineers.”

  “That must be exciting, I’m very jealous of you. I’d love to go up and see the construction, yet we mere mortals must remain on this Earthly plane.”

  “Mere mortals don’t have to breathe recycled air and drink recycled water”.


  Harry Smith gave a deep laugh at that, “Perhaps not, but if we win the resourcing contract I like to think we will be choosing the Adam’s and Eve’s for a new world, and that is why you’re here John, we need your help to determine the characteristics of those first children”.

  “I thought as much, smiled John, have you been in touch with many other experts?”

  “Yes, well, at least to discuss the psychological traits necessary, our HR team are building them into the candidate profiles at the moment.”

  “Any surprises?”

  “Well yes, we initially thought they needed to be resilient to isolation and not easy to bore, but once we realised that we weren’t looking for spacemen but rather we needed to build a community, well that changed a lot” said Harry.

  “I know I mainly deal with nuts and bolts and how to get them into space, but I have been thinking about that a lot too. I have to coordinate a ship that will carry people as its most precious cargo so every decision I make has to revolve around them. It’s comforting to know that the choice of those people would be in good hands.”

  John shocked himself. The smiling and pleasantries had come easily to him; he had been prepared better than he had realised.

  “Too right John, and Ephrem’s hands are the best around. Would you like a scotch? It’s a 12 year old.”

  “No thank you, just a water if you have one, my stomach is at me, one of the hazards of flying so much is that you pick up every virus, sniffle and stomach bug that’s going around.”

  “Just like the colonists I guess. I’ve been told they need strong immune systems, we don’t know what new virus’ await them on the new planet.”

  “Don’t worry too much about that, ideally they should have strong immune systems, but unfortunately there is no definition of what a strong immune system is. Best thing we can do is to develop strict protocols for any encounters they have. There’s a World Health Organisation group working on those.”

  Harry’s forehead creased, “I didn’t know the WHO were working on that, I guess that’s why you’re here. I’ll put all my cards on the table straight out John, we have a pretty good idea what the other companies bidding for this tender are putting together, and it’s all the same. We have all talked to the same people and all our proposals are practically identical.”

  “So you need a different angle that will win it for you?”

  “Yes. What is it John? You have an overview of everything, what are we not seeing?”

  “Can I read through a copy of your proposal?”

  “Of course, I have one here for you. We have the obvious stuff; women in their early twenties unless their skills are vital, healthy, no family history of inheritable genetic disorders etcetera etcetera.”

  “Well, perhaps if we didn’t have imperfections we wouldn’t be human. This line of work has made me quite philosophical about our species. Youth and fertility are fine, but we need some age and experience to get them to their destination.” John flicked through the proposal until he got to the page he wanted, the organigram. He had already read an earlier copy of this document that Bin had given him. “Well, just so the cost of flying me here isn’t wasted, here’s one mistake straight off.”

  Harry moved his seat over to get a better view of the diagram, “It probably needs tweaking but what’s so wrong that you saw it straight away?”

  John had his first opportunity to prove himself. He had to get to the heart of this company, and to do that they needed to call him back again “You only have one organigram. This one is for launch, the captain and senior crew are of course the most important. However, what happens maybe two or three years after launch? They will have left the solar system hopefully and, unless there is an emergency, most things will be automated. Then you don’t have a crew, you have a society, one that needs to become self-governing.”

  “So two then?”

  John closed the proposal and put it under his arm. “More than that, as many as you can think of in fact. You are not just writing job specifications for a crew, you are writing it for their children and grand-children too.”

  Harry downed his drink “We will give you €100,000 to consult on this for the next two months. You are allowed to take on consultation work aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but it won’t be full time, I can maybe spare an hour of free time every two days, just as long as it does not interfere with my work and I do not reveal any research that might be in the patent process. I’ll have to declare it to be taxed, though it’s still a nice earner for a side job.”

  “I take it you will do it then?”

  John didn’t want to seem too eager, it might raise their suspicions, Bin had warned him to bargain on fees. “I’m a busy man Harry, but not greedy. €100,000 is fine but as I said I have to declare it. I’ve had my eye on a sexy Italian recently, nice curves, alloy wheels. Perhaps she could help persuade me?”

  If Sophie was there beside him she would have given him a swift punch to the face for a sexist remark like that. If she was there… but she was not, and this pretence was for her.

  Harry had a look of satisfaction that told John he was in; “Who am I to come between you both? I’m sure my accountant can arrange something, he likes his curvy Italian models too.”

  “Excellent” replied John, “I’ll need an assistant too, someone bright who can get the documents you will need drafted.”

  “That can be arranged too. Do we have a deal?”

  John raised his glass “we have a deal.”

  Chapter 11: 2042

  His arms were so heavy, his breathing was so difficult, and his pulse was so loud. John had a new admiration for those men and women he had been sending components to for the past seven years. His four hours in the water tank was a trial, but it had to be done if he was to be allowed onto the Zheng He. How did all those people work so quickly under these conditions? The tank was supposed to simulate working in low gravity and in this exercise two way traffic on his radio was switched off to simulate the isolation of space in the event of a communications failure. He had completed his task; following instructions in Russian to place differently shaped blocks into differently shaped holes using a robotic arm, yet he still had another hour of silence to endure before the session was over. He wished he had his papers with him so he could get some work done. In two weeks he would take his first trip into orbit and enter the next phase of his work. The engines were ready and on site, they were just waiting on him to arrive to oversee their instillation.

  Grudgingly John had to admit that the project manager who had taken over from him in Cadarache had proven to be more than capable for the job. The engines had been designed so no component weighed more than 10.5 tonnes and was no bigger than the volume of the capsule that carried it into space. Every component had been built twice in case one, or more, of the launches failed; though since the whole project began only one rocket had disintegrated during launch and thankfully that one only carried some general purpose components. Since the engines were effectively fusion generators the duplicate components which would stay on Earth could be reused for power generation. Indeed the sale of the spare components would help cover the cost of some of the launches.

  This was just one of the examples of how the Zheng He was changing technology. The investors in the engines had been right about them and were now reaping the rewards. Already fusion power was becoming affordable and plans were in place to continue manufacturing generators. There were orders for fifty power units from around the globe, each one capable of providing electricity to a small city. John wished he was more financially astute, if he had bought shares in his own project he would be rolling in cash by now. He didn’t wish too much though, between his salary and his consultancy fee with Ephrem he was quite comfortably off. He had already arranged for Abby to begin her education at a rather expensive primary school, she already had a rather expensive nanny.

  It wasn’t just power generation that was booming. Aerospace industry profits we
re through the roof, and not just because of government money funding the shuttles to the Zheng He; space tourism was developing rapidly. So many people wanted to fly into orbit to see the ship up close that private shuttles were being ordered by travel agencies. Inspired by this, the PR department had come up with an idea that could take advantage of this. Between the end of outfitting and launch there would be six years where the accommodation sections of the Zheng He would be idle as tests were being carried out and final preparations were being made. Rather than these rooms go to waste, the plan now was that the Zheng He would become a temporary hotel, boasting the best views money could buy and experiences not available anywhere on Earth. At $5000 a night they hoped to recover some of the material costs from the project. John had already booked rooms for his parents, he only hoped that by the time they could travel, in about twelve years or so, they would still be in good health. Despite all the advancements in comfortable space flight, it was still tough on the body and not recommended for anyone over sixty.