Then they had to purchase and erect the greenhouse kit, design and install the plumbing for both the hot water heating system and the irrigation system, install electrical for the ventilation system, and set up the control system to manage it all twenty-four seven. Fortunately, although Brad wasn’t the gardening type, he was good with systems. They also got a lot of volunteer help from the plant’s contract maintenance team, who were fond of Alyssa and keen to help.
The greenhouse now occupied most of a 60-by-120-foot, six-inch-thick reinforced concrete pad. It was constructed of lightweight rigid plastic tubing, covered with double ply polyethylene sealed to a keyway in the slab to keep out insects, rodents and snakes. It also had a gutter system to collect and store rainwater. They’d managed all that for about ten thousand dollars, which Alyssa and Brad had split between them. While they were at it, with space to spare and free labor from the maintenance team, they had poured a second slab for future expansion.
Brad and Alyssa checked the systems to ensure everything was working well, then spent an hour helping Jose pick the week’s beans, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, lettuce, onions, parsnips, peas and peppers. There wasn’t any weeding to do since they had steam sterilized the soil before planting.
As they mounted their bikes and headed back down Geysers Road toward Healdsburg, Alyssa felt tremendously satisfied. She had a great job, a handsome and caring lover, and she felt she was making a difference for the better in a world that still needed a lot of improving. She was pretty sure that Brad felt much the same. She was excited about their relationship and thought they had more than just a short-term thing.
Chapter 18
Sunday, January 16, 2028
El Peñón summit (9,000 feet) near Vicuña, Chile
Darya was delighted with her new role at the LSST facility and the extension of her stay into the Chilean summer, such as it was at nine thousand feet. The new comet tracking project required a relatively small amount of her time, so she was able to dedicate the rest to analyzing her own thesis data. The processing system at the LSST was more than adequate for her needs, especially when downloaded with her own customized special-purpose wobble detection and extrapolation algorithms.
She was making good progress on her thesis, probably better than if she had returned to the family and social distractions of Oxford and nearby London. So, the additional project was nothing but upside, both from a career and a personal curiosity perspective. She had gladly accepted the role offered by the senior scientist after securing the support and encouragement of her thesis supervisor.
Darya had been intrigued by the transient object, currently labelled X/2027U3, since it had first interrupted her exoplanet research. All staff at the facility were subject to a confidentiality agreement with respect to any research they were involved with or became aware of, but apart from that there was no great secrecy surrounding the tracking project and it was a fairly routine task among the variety of other ongoing projects at the facility. So, no one had discouraged her from staying up to date with the progression of the project as she completed the last few weeks of her fieldwork. Consequently, when the senior scientist asked her to take on the leadership of the project, Darya knew as much as anyone on site about the object and its evolving path, which still wasn’t much.
Darya was initially puzzled by why George felt that the conduct of the tracking project needed any more oversight than the automated systems designed for that purpose and the facility technicians, though she jumped at the chance to stay involved and postpone her departure. Once George revealed to her the findings at the JPL, which she had not been aware of, she better understood his desire to have another set of eyes and mind involved. Plus, she was familiar with the situation and had at least some relevant technical abilities. She also better understood why he reminded her of her professional and legal confidentiality obligations. Of course, once privy to the JPL’s preliminary path projection cone, she was even more attracted to the assignment of gathering additional observations to support the refinement of the projection. The clincher, though none was really needed, was that George told her he was confident that there would be support in high places for any reasonable name that she might wish to give to the object, like perhaps Ahmadi1, whether she took on the project or not.
Darya had not tasked the LSST with any additional surveillance patterns in the latter half of December and the first half of January. She knew from her own work in the field that the Sagittarius region of the sky would not be visible above the horizon for that period, which was why she had timed her own research to be completed by then. She was also in close communication with Tony Galletsia at the JPL, and she knew that, while he would welcome any additional observations, he really needed something that showed the amount of position change over a period of several weeks. So, it made sense to wait until mid-January to fire up the surveillance pattern again.
Darya also had a pretty good idea on where to focus the renewed search. With the cone of probable paths from Tony converted into the coordinate system used to program the aiming points of the LSST, she had a relatively small area of the sky to scan. She also had a pretty good velocity estimate helping to narrow down how far along the cone the object was likely to have traveled. She had overlain the search zone on the star map background of that area to identify which locations within the zone she might be able to spot X/2027U3 as it occluded one of the stars. There were several.
All of the search parameters were loaded into the Big Eye’s scanning schedule and were ready to go. Darya had secured a number of short scanning windows every night following the resumption of the search. She didn’t need much time for each scan because the entire surveillance zone was within the LSST’s image width for a single picture. However, she found she had no difficulty requisitioning all the time she could possibly need. Darya also didn’t think it would take many days of searching the zone to spot the big rock, but she was allowing a day or two of less-than-optimal viewing because she had set the schedule, with encouragement from Tony and George, to capture the earliest possible redetection of the object.
Darya was on the spot in the observatory at eleven o’clock at night as the Big Eye was automatically tasked to her first one-minute surveillance slot. She planned to stay until one o’clock in the morning to watch a couple more picture sequences. She would review the rest in the morning, but with instructions to be immediately called in her dormitory room if anything notable appeared. She had also promised to touch base with Tony each morning with a video call. The two had developed an easygoing friendship in the short time they had been working together.
The young astronomer sat in the viewing room waiting for her pictures to begin displaying, as she had on so many prior occasions. She couldn’t suppress a little shiver of excitement even though she knew that an immediate result was unlikely. The first picture appeared on the large wall screen. A two-dimensional yellow rectangle was superimposed over the target area, taking up about a quarter of the screen so that even if the estimates of the range of possible positions were off by a bit, the LSST could still detect any anomaly over a broader area. Darya could have selected a three-dimensional outline of the target area, but the LSST camera didn’t provide a clear three-dimensional perspective on what it was seeing, so that wouldn’t have added a useful frame of reference.
As the screen shifted to the second fifteen-second picture of the target area, once again the detection alert sounded, and Darya’s pulse rate spiked. Sure enough, the screen cycled back to the initial picture now carrying a “Transient Object Detected” banner and a small green square enclosing a small part of the sky within the yellow rectangle. The difference was that there was also a second banner across the bottom of the screen below the first, which bore the words “Direct Observation.” Sure enough, in the center of the green cursor square, she could see a noticeable tiny pale point of light where none belonged.
The transient object detection program continued to sound the alert
and to snap pictures every fifteen seconds, overriding the task scheduler. Darya quickly scanned through the next five pictures and could not see any changes perceptible to the eye. She instructed the senior operator, who she knew quite well by now, to silence the alert and resume the regular schedule. She included the proviso that she wanted another minute of pictures every ten minutes for the next hour before reverting to one minute on the hour every hour. She told him she was going to head back to her room to examine the pictures and would be on call if anything came up. He was to turn the alert tone off before each repeat scan to minimize the drama for the rest of the night.
Back in her room Darya examined the six pictures carefully and ran them through a piece of software similar to the transient object detector but set to detect finer variations over very short time intervals. It could even detect the motion of storms in the atmosphere of some of the solar system’s planets. She also ran the next four pictures after that. Neither her visual inspection with a special-purpose ten-times magnifier, nor the program, could detect any difference between the photos, using the first one as the base for each comparison.
Every picture showed the same tiny but distinct glow. At first Darya had wondered whether she had captured an energy release in the visible spectrum from the collision of two distant objects, possibly one of them being her comet. However, without even running the calculations on the mass and impact velocity required to generate enough energy to be visible at fifty AU or more, even to the LSST, it soon became clear that the image was both too stable and too regular to be the result of an explosion. Even at that distance the object was large enough for the LSST to resolve the image into a definite disk — a disk where none had been before — even at the relatively low magnification used for transient object searches. Darya knew better than anyone what that must mean. She called over to the senior operator to request a series of four pictures at fifteen-minute intervals but at maximum magnification.
After checking this picture sequence and applying another special-purpose program to the new magnified images, Darya sent a brief note to George. She said only that she had captured another position observation on the transient object, including an unexpected aspect. She suggested that the project team have a video conference at ten o’clock in the morning Pacific time. She could brief him at nine o’clock. She sent a similar message to Tony, suggesting that he give a heads-up to his bosses that the senior scientist would be calling for a conference. She also routed the position data and images from the latest observation to his inbox. She knew that he was well prepared and would have plenty of time before ten o’clock to update the projected path cone and associated visual display. However, she planned to call him at seven o’clock just to make sure he was up and had received the data. Then she tumbled into bed to catch a few hours of sleep before what she expected to be an eventful day.
Chapter 19
Monday, January 17, 2028
Washington, DC
President James Rushton sat at his desk in the Oval Office and took a few minutes to compose his thoughts before a formal call with the President of Mexico. Although there was no prearranged agenda for the call, he was pretty sure he knew what was on the mind of his southern neighbor.
A few days earlier President Rushton had announced both a significant technological breakthrough in the high-efficiency, low-cost conversion of salt water to fresh water, and also the formation of the Libyan Peace and Prosperity Cooperation League. The League’s Middle Eastern membership included Egypt and Saudi Arabia, plus both groups who claimed to be the rightful government of Libya, and two other Libyan leaders exercising de facto control over much of the coastal area between Tripoli in the west and Bengasi in the east. The non-Arab members of the League included the United States, Britain, France, Spain and Italy. Membership was open to any other Arab or non-Arab participants willing to agree to the terms of the League.
The League’s cooperation agreement stipulated that none of the Libyan members would employ offensive military force to seize territory from any other member, or otherwise attack any other member. Any restoration of centralized government would be by a negotiated consensual and democratic process. The non-Libyan members agreed to abide by the resolutions made by the United Nations prohibiting provision of arms to any party within Libya. They also agreed that they would not participate or assist in a military action taken by one Libyan member of the League against another. The agreement did not require non-Libyan members to come to the assistance of a Libyan member experiencing an attack from some other party but permitted such assistance.
Setting aside the nonaggression provisions of the Cooperation League, which were of considerable importance in stabilizing Libya on their own, the most notable feature of the agreement was the carrot. Each Libyan member of the League was going to receive several water production and distribution systems complete with separate stand-alone solar power plants and pipeline distribution networks, sixteen systems in all.
Each system was capable of supplying the fresh water needs of about one hundred and fifty thousand people, including sufficient water for irrigation for the crops and chickens required to feed them. The result would be to turn a good portion of one of the most arid locations of the world into a largely self-sufficient, agriculturally productive oasis. It would directly substantially enhance the standard of living of nearly half the population of the country, and indirectly benefit most of the rest.
It would have been possible to have a significant favorable impact on Libya’s water needs with a less substantial investment, perhaps half or even a third of the sixteen systems committed, but the president had decided to make a dramatic statement about U.S. policy in the region. President Rushton’s State Department advisors believed that Libya’s resulting improved economic circumstances would greatly stabilize the fractious domestic political situation.
The United States had agreed to supply all the desalination plants to the League at cost, using its latest high-efficiency technology. The United States would also provide overall project management. Other non-Libyan members were supplying various other components and construction and maintenance services. The funding of the total expenses of the fresh water project was being provided by the non-Libyan members, with the largest share from the United States. The president felt it was a small price to pay to improve the lives of many people living an otherwise marginal existence, stabilize a volatile nation, and preempt the establishment of a Russian proxy state in the heart of the Mediterranean while avoiding a military confrontation. His European and Middle Eastern allies shared his satisfaction with the outcome and appreciated the U.S. leadership after a period in which such leadership had been a rarity. Few thought it likely that the situation in Libya would progress anytime soon to a reconsolidation of the country under a single democratic government, but at least the stage had been set.
Not part of the Libyan agreement and not the subject of any public announcement, Egypt and Saudi Arabia were also to receive desalination plants at cost and, in Egypt’s case, with a grant from the United States and European members that would cover half the cost.
The phone on his desk rang. He picked it up to hear the White House operator advise that she was connecting the President of Mexico, Luis Lopez. James Rushton knew Lopez fairly well, better than the heads of state of nearly every other country other than Canada. The two respected and liked each other, having worked together on the North American Carbon Tax and Credit Agreement, as well as the reinstituted North American Free Trade Agreement, early in Jim’s tenure as vice president and past President Mahally’s right-hand confidant.
“Good morning, Mr. President,” came across the line in clear, slightly accented English, “I am calling to congratulate you on two counts. First is your recently announced technological breakthrough in the production of fresh water. Although my country has not been made aware of any of the details, I am sure that this could be of tremendous benefit to a thirsty world. Not all countries are blessed with t
he tremendous fresh water resources that much of your country takes for granted. Congratulations also on your peace initiatives in Libya, including your generous gift of your new fresh water capabilities to that dry country. I am sure that your adversary is no longer a factor in that location. Well struck, as we say in golf and football.”
Jim knew that President Lopez wasn’t referring to American football but to soccer. More importantly, though, he thought he could also detect that his Mexican counterpart was aware of not only the publically announced carrot component of his peace initiative in Libya, but also of the covert military action. He also detected a soupçon of envy with respect to the desalination technology and perhaps disappointment that more information on it had not been offered to his government. So, he was pretty sure he knew what was coming next, but he kept his reply neutral and open-ended.
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Jim responded. “Although I think we know each other well enough to dispense with titles when it is just the two of us talking. I appreciate the recognition of our technology and peace successes by our close friend and neighbor to the south. However, I don’t think that you would have initiated this call simply to give me a pat on the back, so do you have any other matters on your mind?”
The Mexican president responded, “Of course, Jim. You are right, and I am proud to know we are on a first-name basis. I assumed that you were alone, but I couldn’t be sure. You are also right that there is more on my mind, but please don’t feel that my congratulations are any less sincerely meant because they precede another matter I wish to discuss. That matter is simply this: If you are willing to be so generous in supplying fresh water plants to a thirsty country halfway around the world, would you not also be willing to assist your friend and next-door neighbor? We too would benefit greatly from this technology if you’d be prepared to supply us with the plants at your cost, rather than at the large markup that I expect we would face if we tried to buy directly from your business corporations.”
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