Analog SFF, December 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  "Let's see your problem,” T.J. cut in. She wasn't about to let him seem the slightest bit human. “Zen here is eager to fix you up and send you on your way safely back to Earth.” She yanked the helmet out of Zen's hands and slapped it into Cutter's arms.

  Cutter frowned and clenched his jaw. I cringed a bit, knowing that was probably a hard speech for a man like Cutter to start on and a harder one to have thrown back in his face. His eyes shifted to Zen and then to me, as if assessing whether we wanted to hear him keep talking. I tried to look sympathetic but firm. Finally, he said, “Right. Follow me."

  He squeezed into their ship, Zen following. “Colonel Bianco?” I whispered to T.J. as we waited together for our turns to crawl through the airlock. She was four years out of the U.S. Air Force, so the title was a huge stretch. And there weren't any titles like that in Openshot.

  "I'll marry Zen before I let that bastard call me T.J.” She hissed back. Then she pushed me through the hatch.

  It smelled like roses in their ship, to be honest. Maybe with a faint scent of oil. Very good air filters, I guess. And everything was white and clean and dry. It was enough to make a systems engineer feel inadequate about his designs, except for the little fact that they were dead in space and our humble odiferous ship was still working.

  Caldridge, Cutter's lead engineer, floated before us. “Hello,” he called, and smiled with what looked like genuine relief. “I'm Dave Caldridge."

  We knew his bio. MIT PhD in Aerospace E. Navy pilot. We had another round of shaking hands. Then Zen surprised us by saying, “We were damn sorry to hear about Steven.” Steven Frazier had been their second in command, and by everyone's estimation, the brains of Cutter's launch. “He was a good man. Smart. Fantastic engineer. Fun to know. Many people will miss him."

  Cutter and Caldridge both blinked and swallowed. I nodded. T.J. looked uncomfortable.

  After a moment, Zen pointed around the room in what was obviously meant to be a kind of question about their status.

  Caldridge cleared his throat. “A fuel line broke,” he explained. He pointed at the rear of the ship. “Or maybe a joint in the line cracked. Whichever, it leaked liquid oxygen through an external panel—” He pointed along the wall, indicating the path of LOX between the hull and interior panels. “And that made some of the seals brittle. A backup oxygen tank blew, cracked the hull, and we had a decompression.” He finished by pointing at a large black patch on the wall, where it appeared they had covered a hole with a big equivalent of the patch from a bicycle repair kit. “Steven was killed in the depressurization. Austen got his helmet on and then he got mine on me—I was out cold—but Steven was uncomfortable in his suit and had taken it off and by the time we got it on him and put his helmet on...."

  "Sorry,” Zen said again. The rest of us nodded.

  "Yeah. His body's in the landing module right now.” Caldridge pointed at another panel. “We turned the fuel line off at the tank when we figured out the problem, and we could maybe replace the line or joints by scavenging some lines from the landing module. But the hydraulic piping that controls the nozzle cuff broke. One hydraulic line is still good, though, so the cuff is being pressed sideways. If we fired it, it would spin us in a circle."

  Zen nodded. “Can't turn off the other hydraulic?"

  Caldridge shook his head. “No. The cut-off is behind the panel, and when we started to open the panel, when we just cracked it, it was full of oil that got everywhere. The stuff can gum up the air filters. We need a way to suck up the hydraulic fluid, and we didn't bring any paper towels."

  "Depressurize and open the panel?” T.J. asked.

  "I wanted to,” Cutter said. “And we were going to, before we thought to contact you. But.... “He looked at Caldridge.

  "I'm against it,” Caldridge explained. “The throttle-control hydraulics are in there also. We could blow those, too, if we open the panel to vacuum. And the patch in the hull breach is mostly kept in place by internal pressure, and it's the only patch we have that size."

  We talked it over. Cutter and T.J. visibly fidgeted while we picked at the details, both of them impatient but not willing to talk to each other while the engineers worked out the possibilities. To me, they were strikingly similar to each other, though I know T.J. would have killed me if I had said that aloud.

  I recorded our conversation and posted it in real time to the Openshot network to get engineers around the world working on it, but the problem was clear. They had a bunch of control lines meant to receive minimal exposure to vacuum that were blowing up and would contaminate the ship if we dug through to them. We couldn't fit everyone in the Stallman, so we had to be careful and fix the Cutter ship.

  After an hour our ground team had a plan. “I've got a first proposal,” I said. I had network glasses on and was looking away from them like a blind man as I read messages from Ground Control. “We soak up the oil, then scavenge the hydraulics from your landing module and replace the hydraulics here. If that works, we try the more dangerous repair of the fuel line. We can depressurize the Openshot and leave from there to get to your lander. Then we stay docked, in case your lines blow again. First you burn to both get ascent and first transearth injection, then we flip and we burn to complete transearth injection. We return together."

  "And how do you clean the oil up?” Cutter and T.J. asked simultaneously.

  "You have to cut your hair off,” I told T.J.

  "What?"

  "What?” Cutter echoed.

  "Human hair is very effective at soaking up oil,” I told her. “And you're the only one with any hair."

  "That's true,” she snorted, and made an exaggerated show of looking at Cutter and Caldridge, both of whom had only little halos over their ears. Caldridge laughed amiably. Zen and I had both shaved our heads just before launch.

  "Who had this idea?” she asked.

  "Uh,” I turned my attention back to the net displays. “A fifteen-year-old girl in Sri Lanka. Her name is Ravijindran Seshadri. She wants to be an aerospace engineer. Her mother owns a hair parlor, and they have long noticed that hair absorbs oils very effectively."

  "Anybody tell her she's a threat to human destiny?” T.J. asked. Cutter frowned and started to speak, but T.J. interrupted him.

  "Okay, who has scissors?"

  "I have a knife,” Zen said.

  I cut her hair close to her head, and Cutter pulled off his t-shirt, exposing a well-muscled chest, and knotted the sleeves of it to make a kind of bag. I knew that T.J. liked her long hair, but she managed to not even flinch as I hacked away at it.

  She asked, “And when are you and I going down, Zen?"

  "Can't,” Zen said.

  "That's right,” I told her. “Two have to scavenge their lander—that has to be Zen and Caldridge. They're the engineers."

  "We're all engineers,” T.J. said with annoyance.

  "You know what I mean,” I said. There were engineers and then there were astronauts with engineering degrees.

  "Okay, so you and I go down while the PhDs tinker."

  "We can't expect Cutter to control the orbit module for rendezvous. Those are my systems. They're a little—personalized."

  "So we wait. Then Zen goes down with me after all of this is fixed."

  "Not good,” Zen said. “Undependable.” He pointed a thumb toward the patch on the Cutter ship's hull.

  T.J. didn't like where this was going.

  "I'm going down alone, then."

  "No,” I said slowly. “It'll have to be with Cutter."

  Cutter smiled and tried to look agreeable. “I would be honored. And you and I are pilots, Colonel. We're only in the way here."

  She spun to face Cutter. I growled in protest as I had to jump back to ensure I didn't stab her with the knife I'd been cutting her hair with. “We're not sharing the prize,” she said to Cutter. “Get that clear."

  "Of course not,” Cutter said. “The prize is yours. If you can land."

  "Shit,” she said.
<
br />   * * * *

  "There's a big rock right below you,” I told T.J. over radio.

  "I see it,” T.J. said. “Give me another ten seconds of burn,” she told Cutter. The landing module shook, and the roar was clear right through their helmets so that I could hear it in the command module. We had learned from the Apollo missions about how the landing could stir up a lot of dust and had radar on the base of the ship, and I was watching that as T.J. took a visual and fed instructions to Cutter. She peered out of the window and glanced at the two bottom-camera views and held her breath as they drifted past the sharp-looking spire of stone that loomed in the middle of the landing site.

  They had dropped smoothly down toward the Lunar surface, burning first the main engine to drive descent and then attitude jets to line them up for landing. The soft gray dust had slowly resolved into different shades and then into a surface shot with shadows as the boulders and smaller craters came into resolution. Cutter chatted away for the first forty-five minutes of descent, running twice through the landing procedures, questioning me on the radio and then T.J. Finally, he tested the waters with T.J. again.

  "Listen, I'm sorry if the things I said insulted you."

  T.J. snorted. “Openshot is landing, so what we did puts the lie to everything you said. Right?"

  She asked the rhetorical question pointedly, and he couldn't resist answering it. “I never said you couldn't win."

  "No,” she spat bitterly. “What you said was, and I quote, ‘the Open Source Rocket Program'—you couldn't even bother to name Openshot properly—'the Open Source Rocket Program will have a tremendously negative—’”

  I couldn't help it: I interjected, “Pernicious."

  "A voice from the heavens. Thank you, yes: ‘A tremendously pernicious effect on humanity and human destiny by destroying the benefits of privatizing space exploration with an unsustainable—’”

  "I did not say unsustainable,” Cutter interrupted. “I said ‘unscalable.’”

  "'An unscalable stunt.’”

  "I still believe that your approach isn't scalable. Look, you and I and Penguin want the same things."

  "You just want to win."

  "Sure. So do you. But I want the human race to go into space. And you can't do that with this kind of model. Space is expensive. Where does the capital come from on your approach? Who pays for it?"

  I almost answered over the command line, but T.J. answered first, and to my surprise, she answered clearly and well. “Do the math. Most of the cost of space exploration goes into design. Open source makes design better, and it makes it cheaper, and it makes it safer. That's scalable."

  "But you have to make ships!” He said. “Who will—"

  "Enough,” T.J. interrupted. “You have to fly this ship. So talk philosophy with Penguin when you get back to Earth, and right now just shut up and take orders."

  He'd been silent after that, except to answer commands. T.J. had hardly spoken either, grunting answers to questions and mustering English only to correct Cutter. Fortunately, our two landing procedures were similar—and Cutter had studied ours, as they were public—so we could let him control the landing burn throttle as T.J. surveyed the landing prospects visually.

  "Good. That's it,” she told him. “There's too much damn dust kicked up now for us to see much else."

  "Radar shows clear range,” I interjected. “Though radar's not much use at this distance."

  "Just got to hope we're lucky,” T.J. said. “Drift nicely down. Touch it.” I heard the shudder of thrust. “Okay, again. Again. Wait. Again. We're there. Get ready for touchdown. Give me two seconds. Right."

  The module trembled as the landing spikes settled into the bright powder. They had a meter per second of speed, some of it lateral, and the lander tilted slightly, as if it wanted to tip, before it fell back and settled.

  "Orbital,” T.J. called to me. “The Stallman LLM has landed."

  "Luna, congratulations,” I shouted. Zen laughed and howled behind me.

  T.J. and Cutter snapped off their seat straps. “Powering down our engines."

  "We have received congratulations from the International Lunar Peace Race Board,” I added, reading the message off my visor. “As soon as there is a moonwalk, Openshot has won the contest."

  I switched my view to full visual through T.J.'s suit cameras and saw that she had opened up full net projection on the inside of her helmet screen, just to see the graphs of communication volume moving through the Openshot net channels. She skimmed a few of the congratulations coming in from members. An engineer in India. A doctor in China. A schoolgirl in France. A former astronaut in Russia.

  "Let's depressurize and walk,” Cutter said.

  "Right,” T.J. said. She sounded cheerful. “Let's."

  She forced a methodical run through the full checklist, and then they vented the landing module's atmosphere.

  "Command, I'm about to open the hatch.” T.J. reached for the long, heavy red handle of the manual hatch release. Cutter was in her way, crouching between her and the hatch in the cramped quarters of the lander.

  "'Cuse me,” she said.

  "No."

  She pulled back, surprised. “What?"

  "No. I'm going first."

  "What the hell are you talking about? You can't possibly think the jury will award you the prize that way.” She pushed him aside and managed to grip the manual release handle and hold on, but he pushed back and wedged himself into the recess of the hatch.

  I cut in. “Luna, this is Orbital. Jury rules are clear. It is the landing module that determines prizewinner. You won't get anything for walking out there first, Cutter."

  "To hell with the prize,” Cutter said. “I just want to be first. I owe it to Steven. I promised him we'd walk first on the moon. And we got here first."

  "No, you didn't,” T.J. said. “You got into orbit first."

  "We'd be here already, if you hadn't blackmailed us."

  "You couldn't put your lander down because your ship has a shitty design. That's what the contest is about, you ass."

  Cutter's voice got calmer. He sounded resolved. “I could have walked here yesterday. And I promised Steven,” he looked pointedly at T.J.'s suit legs, which were filled out now with the prosthetics that she had put back on. “I promised Steven one of us would walk first on the moon on our own two feet."

  There was a long pause.

  "You son of a bitch,” T.J. whispered. “Do you realize the whole world is watching you right now, listening to you?” I heard T.J. grunt then, as she grabbed Cutter and tried to pull him out of the recess of the hatch, but she had no leverage and it was impossible. Finally, Cutter reached up and pulled the hatch lever down. Behind him, a pale gray glare shone. He backed out onto the ladder.

  T.J. held her breath. I switched my view to the outside lateral camera and watched as Cutter leapt from the top of the ladder, as if afraid T.J. was going to reach out and pull him back in if he didn't rush. He landed hard and said, after a grunt, “I return to Earth's moon in memory of Steven Frazier, astronaut."

  I switched my view back to inside T.J.'s helmet. She had left the net traffic images playing on her visor, and as she and Cutter had argued the color of the messages had shifted from green to red. I saw there now a long line of messages, bright with urgency tags, with subject lines like, “CUT HIS SUIT!!!” And “RE: HIT THE BASTARD."

  "I'm going to kill him,” T.J. whispered. With a few violent jerks she pulled the manual hatch release free from the bolt it turned. It was massive, a long steel wrench.

  I had override control for all systems, in case someone was hurt and I had to take over. I closed down her net views and her outgoing public lines and then spoke to her, loud, on a private channel. “T.J., listen to me. Listen. Think of what he just did."

  "He stole the walk,” she whispered. “And I'm going to kill him."

  "T.J., he did something we never could. He just revoked the articles of incorporation for space. He just made
the most eloquent argument for the Openshot dream anyone could have made. We got him here using the open source methods, using cooperation and an open discussion of our challenges. And he had to steal the opportunity from you. Let him go, let him act like he won. Because we just won. We won the money. And more importantly, we won the argument. Open source will have a seat at the table from now on. It will be part of humanity's expansion into space. We won everything we wanted, T.J. You won everything."

  She said nothing. But she didn't move.

  "T.J., leave the wrench, ignore him, walk out there now, and history will say that you were the one who returned. You were the first to prove that space exploration is something everyone can be part of. Go. Prove it. Prove you are the winner."

  I was crying now as I said it, the tears clotting awkwardly in my eyes and clinging to my lashes top and bottom after I blinked. Zen had floated up next to me, and he put a hand on my shoulder.

  "Prove it,” he whispered to her.

  T.J. put the handle back onto the hatch bolt, and bent down to peer out at the open white surface of Luna. I returned control to her suit and opened her lines.

  She climbed slowly out and descended the steps silently, in reverence. She stood a long time on the last rung, looking out over the soft powder of Earth's primeval twin. Billions of us had longed to walk there, to run there, to set foot upon that tauntingly nearby world. Some few had done it, and now, now, perhaps our return was the first of many returns.

  T.J. stepped down on Luna and said, her voice soft but clear, “For everyone."

  Copyright (c) 2006 Craig DeLancy

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  THE ALTERNATE VIEW: EPR COMMUNICATION: SIGNALS FROM THE FUTURE? by John G. Cramer

  Last June I was an invited speaker at the symposium “Frontiers of Time: Reverse Causation—Experiment and Theory,” part of a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) held on the beautiful campus of the University of San Diego. (Here, reverse causation means a violation of that most mysterious law of physics, the Principle of Causality, which requires that any cause must precede its effects in all reference frames.) I had originally intended to just talk about my work on the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics and its somewhat retrocausal aspects (i.e., back-in-time handshakes of quantum waves, etc.). However, a new idea involving signaling with nonlocal quantum processes had come my way, and I decided to present it as a retrocausal quantum paradox at the symposium. It made a big splash there, but none of the experts present could identify any problem with the proposed thought experiment or resolve the paradox. In this column I want to tell you about this causality-violating communications scheme and its possible consequences.