Back to the Moon

by Travis S. Taylor

  “Well, I think we need to tell our passengers they cannot float around while the engines are firing. I don’t believe Newton would be too happy. I’m sure our movie animators will be trained better if they ever get to go on a flight.” The remark received a few chuckles, but some of those chuckling didn’t really understand why it would be funny—just that floating around while firing rocket engines was somehow bad and that it had something to do with rocket science. “There will be ample time for our passengers to experience weightlessness during their six-day trip to the Moon and back.

  “Our trajectory will put us on a course to pass around the far side of the Moon and then return to the Earth. We’ll come within sixty-five miles of the Moon. And our passengers will have one heck of a view!

  “From that distance, this is what the Moon will look like to them. And as they swing around the Moon, this is how small the Earth will appear.” The video showed animated craters and mountains in amazing computer-graphic detail. In the distance was a small blue and white beauty—Earth. The video then shifted to more scientific details and illustrated the Earth-Moon system, showing the Dreamscape’s trajectory as a dotted line from the Earth, around and behind the Moon, and then back to the Earth. The final frames showed the ship entering the Earth’s atmosphere and gliding to a landing at the Nevada Spaceport, changing almost seamlessly from the in-space animation to video shot of an actual Dreamscape landing.

  Gesling placed the pointer on the podium, still fully extended, in case he needed to pick it up again during the question-and-answer period. He picked it back up but then realized he was fidgeting with his hands. Flying in space didn’t make him nervous at all. In fact, it pleased and excited him. The damned press, on the other hand…

  The reporter from CNN was the first with his hand up. Paul nodded to him.

  “You are charging your customers twenty-five million dollars per seat—that’s only one hundred twenty-five million total for the trip. Yet NASA is spending billions of dollars for its landing mission. Why such a big difference? How are you able to do so much yet charge your customers so little?”

  Childers motioned to Gesling and O’Conner that he wanted to answer this one, and he stepped up with a smile on his face.

  “Well, there are really two reasons for this. First, the American dollar has rebounded in the last decade from the economic recession of the decade before. Had we done this ten years ago, the price would have been double or maybe triple the cost. And because we’re using technology that NASA already developed, we don’t have to pay as much to develop our own. Did I say two reasons? Okay, really three. The first few flights don’t have to make money. It is no secret that I have money. Lots of money. I’m rich, and I choose to spend my money underwriting the company and its bottom line. We’ve got a solid business plan that will result in us making back my investment and then some. It just won’t happen during the first few years of operation. But in ten years, when we are ready to make our first landing on the Moon, charging one hundred million per seat, we’ll be turning a hefty profit for our major investors—and that is mostly me. So you see, I plan to make more money off this little adventure.”

  “Mr. Childers! Mike Mahan, Fox News. What about the risk? NASA is conducting a robotic test run before sending any people. So far, it looks like it is going well. Aren’t you taking a big risk by not doing something similar? What if you lost a crew?”

  “We will have one more test flight. It will be orbital. We’re going to go through all the steps up to departing for the Moon. But the real answer to this one is directly related to the first question. If we were to make Dreamscape robotic, not only would Captain Gesling be out of a job, but it would have perhaps doubled our development costs. No, we’ve flown people to orbit and kept them there for longer than this Moon trip will take. We know how the ship will respond, and she’s well designed. We also know that we will take advantage of something called ‘Lunar Free Return,’ which will pretty much guarantee that the ship and her passengers will come home—just like NASA did on Apollo 13. We’re managing the risks, and my customers will be safe and have one fantastic vacation—providing the laws of physics remain as they always have.” Childers spoke with confidence and authority and a tinge of humor in his voice. And he believed what he was saying as he said it through a toothy smile.

  The next half hour or so of the press conference was filled with questions about the training of the passengers and the various regulatory hurdles Space Excursions had had to overcome in order to send people to the Moon independently of any government. Childers fielded most of them, leaving only the technical questions for Gesling to answer. Near the end of the allotted time, the reporter from the China Daily raised his hand.

  “Mr. Childers. Mr. Childers, please. Does not your company do business with NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense? Is not the reason you’re not concerned with making money because they are, in fact, paying for this mission as part of an American attempt to secure the Moon and the mineral resources there for itself? Are you not a front for the American government under the guise of commercialism?”

  Childers, Gesling, and the unflappable Caroline O’Conner were all taken aback by this one. They weren’t certain if the man was serious or some sort of nut. Both O’Conner and Gesling looked to Childers to respond. And respond he did. Paul smiled at the fire in his boss’s voice.

  “With all due respect, my company is my company. Yes, we do business for NASA and for other agencies within the U.S. government. They, like the Dreamscape passengers, are my customers. All of this is public knowledge, and I am proud of what we do and for whom we do it. Yes, I have government contracts. But they don’t come close to paying for this spacecraft. Hell, the government cost me more damned money in legal issues than building that space rocket!”

  He calmed down a little and continued. “There is no conspiracy surrounding what we do nor with this trip. It is what it is. I’m in business to make money and give my customers one hell of a ride. I hope that answers your question, and, as far as I am concerned, this news conference is over.”

  With that, Childers walked from the stage, still clearly agitated by the last question. Childers was more agitated, in fact, than Gesling would have thought possible.

  “Damn,” Paul leaned toward O’Conner and whispered. “What’s up with that?” Gesling was surprised that a question most in the room would consider balderdash would get such a response from Childers—perhaps giving it more credibility than it deserved.

  “Search me,” O’Conner responded with a shrug as she moved toward the podium to more formally close out the news conference. “I don’t know, but I need to wrap this up on a more positive note or that will be the question everyone here will remember—and we clearly don’t want that being the sound bite on tonight’s news!”

  I dunno, I kinda liked it. Shows we’ve got balls, Paul thought to himself. If he’d been holding the pointer, he could have smacked it in his hands like a billy club for effect. He stood sternly anyway and glared with a slight grin at the press members—the boss’s enforcer. He decided then and there that he liked Childers and had every intention of keeping his job and his boss happy, no matter how annoying the passengers got.

  Chapter 8

  During the tour, while Caroline O’Conner was charming the four dozen or so reporters and their accompanying camera crews with her knowledge of Space Excursions, Dreamscape, and space exploration in general, Gesling’s telephone buzzed in his pocket, almost startling him. Somewhat annoyed, he took a deep breath and then fished it out of his pocket. Paul thumbed the center key and then the number key to unlock the thing, and then it dinged at him, saying that he’d received a text message from Childers.

  The message read:

  after the tour, meet me in my office asap.

  Gesling was used to getting boss-grams and didn’t really give it much thought. At that point, he couldn’t imagine that the text message and Childers’s reaction to the question asked by the r
eporter from the China Daily were related. But he was soon to discover that, unfortunately, they most certainly were. He plopped the phone back in his pocket and ignored it for the time being.

  Completing the tour and seeing the reporters to the heavily monitored exit from the Nevada test facility took about another hour and a half. Pual’s stomach croaked at him a time or two and then started in with a full rumble. He had skipped breakfast and by now was ravenously hungry. He debated whether or not to grab a bite before hotfooting it off to Childers’s office. He opted to grab a candy bar and a soda from the break room first. The candy bar at least quieted, if not appeased, the rumble in his stomach. The soda helped, too.

  Gary Childers’s Nevada office was not nearly as spectacular as the one in Kentucky. A desk, credenza, and table were the only furniture pieces, and only a few deep-space photographs adorned the walls. By the time Paul got there, he saw that a meeting was already taking place. In the room were Mark Watson, Space Excursions’ chief of security, Helen Jones, the “IT Lady,” who kept the computer network operational, and David Chu, the lead systems engineer for the Dreamscape itself.

  It took only seconds for Gesling to determine that everyone in the room was agitated about something. They were all seated at the meeting table and all looked up when he entered the room. He couldn’t tell if they were upset with him or were welcoming an interruption to their apparently intense discussion. Paul was beginning to feel agitated himself, because he didn’t have a damned clue what all the hubbub was about.

  “Come in, Paul. We’ve got a problem.” Childers motioned for him to take a seat at the table next to him. Paul took the last sip of his soda and dropped the can and the candy-bar wrapper in the garbage can by the door. The IT Lady sneered at him as she looked back and forth between the garbage can and the recycle bin beside it. Paul bit his tongue to prevent him from saying the word hippie and ignored the sneer as he sat.

  “Sure. What’s up? You guys look like we’ve lost the vehicle or something.”

  “Well,” Chu commented, “in a manner of speaking, we have.”

  “What?!”

  This time, the IT Lady picked up the discussion. “Paul, we’ve got a major security breach. One of my team began to suspect something was up last week when he noticed an uptick in outgoing data volume from e-mails, file transfers, et cetera. You know, the usual stuff. But this uptick wasn’t from any particular user or at any specific time. It was about a twenty-percent increase in everyone’s data usage. When we looked more closely, we saw that every single file being transferred was statistically larger than it should have been, given our past few years of data.”

  “Really?” He leaned forward.

  “When we moved from looking at the overall system level and began looking at specific outgoing messages, we saw that each and every message had some additional data encoded and attached to it. Sort of a hidden attachment, as it were. Then we noticed that messages were also being cc’d to an additional e-mail address. And not the same e-mail address—hundreds of different ones, not one being the same. In a matter of a few days, the extra data volume that went out of here was over a terabyte. And that was before any flags had really been raised. Had a single user been sending that much data, we would have shut him down immediately.”

  Gesling was not an information-technology expert, but he was pretty smart, and what she was describing sounded deceptively simple. Almost too simple to be possible.

  “What data was being sent? Financial? Technical?”

  “Good question.” Chu was quick to respond. “Technical. Whoever did this got most of the Dreamscape design and a lot of performance data.”

  “That’s the way it looks now.” Jones continued her explanation. “Yes, it was technical. Somehow, a Trojan software program was latent in all of our computers until it was activated last week. Once it turned on, it began to systematically carve up and send out selected data files from every computer in the office. It found our engineering drawings, customized software design tools, parts specifications, test reports, everything. You name it. We haven’t found a single computer that wasn’t compromised.”

  “Goddammit all to hell! I can’t believe we let this happen!” It was Gary Childers’s turn to add to the tempest.

  “By the time we realized what was happening and cut off our access to the outside world late last night, it was too late,” Jones said decisively.

  “Hundreds of e-mail addresses?” Gesling asked. “Is there a common link? Do we know who we’re dealing with here?”

  “China” was the answer from the IT Lady. “I asked Phil.”

  Phil was on Helen’s team and was well known by just about everyone in the company as the guy you called when your system went down. He seemed to be able to fix anything. He was also an ex-hacker. When he was in high school, he was expelled for hacking the school’s computer system. When he was in college, he was arrested for hacking a computer at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. There was a story about how he’d managed to get out of jail time, but Paul had never heard it.

  Phil had always said it was because he did it just for the sake of doing it—sort of like the answer people gave when asked for their motivation in climbing Mount Everest—or for going to the Moon. He never tried to take anything or cause any problems, he just had to prove to himself that he could do it.

  He never graduated from college, but that hadn’t kept Helen Jones from recognizing his talent and convincing the company to pay him enough that he would not consider climbing any more Mount Everests while employed by Space Excursions. Phil was good at his job and had outside connections that could help him in situations like this. Helen didn’t want to ask who some of these outside connections were.

  “Phil nosed around some. He said that we were getting IP port probes on a regular basis now and that the packets that left here went where the probes are coming from. He thinks it all went to China.”

  “Do we know how our systems were compromised?” Mark Watson asked.

  “Uh, well,” Jones responded. “Mark, look at your cell phone. Where does it say it was made? Check yours, too, Paul. Gary, flip over that laptop and tell me where it was assembled.”

  Childers picked up the laptop that was sitting idle in front of him and read from the back.

  “Assembled in China.”

  “Same here,” Watson replied.

  “Mine, too,” said Gesling.

  “Of course they are.” Knowing that she had their full attention, Helen Jones continued her explanation. “All of the computers in the facility were either made or assembled in China. The company name on the outside is as red, white, and blue as you’d ever want. But the lure of cheap labor is too much for the CEOs—present company excluded, Mr. Childers. We’ve outsourced almost all of our computer-manufacturing base to China.

  “I believe our computers came with some additional software embedded in the operating system. It was then triggered or turned on by someone who knew what we were doing here.”

  “Wait a minute.” Childers leaned forward in his seat. “Are you telling me you’ve figured all this out since last night?”

  “Oh, heavens no,” Jones responded. “No, at this point it is just a theory. The idea wasn’t mine. It was Phil’s. It seems this is an active discussion among the hacker community and pretty well known there ‘unofficially.’ There have apparently been other incidents that Phil knew about. When we started looking into our problem, he told me about them.”

  Watson could contain himself no longer.

  “Folks. Are you aware of the implications here? Yes, we’ve lost some expensive and important technical data. But what about the rest of the country? We aren’t the only ones who own this brand of computers. What about the banks? Other defense contractors? The government, for God’s sake. If her theory is correct, then we could have a security breach of national importance!”

  “Alright, alright, let’s settle down a bit.” Childers took back control of the meeting. “All
in good time, Mr. Watson. We need to ascertain the degree to which we’ve been compromised, fix the leak—no, stop the leak—and then we can figure out who to report it to. And we will report it—but not just yet. First, I need to understand what this means to us.

  “I need to know something for absolute certain.” Childers looked at Gesling and Chu as he spoke. “Is there anything someone can do with this data that will compromise our flight? We have a manifest of paying customers and a launch date. I need to know if this leak will force a delay.”

  “Gary, if all they did was copy our files, then we should be okay,” Chu said. “But are we sure that’s all that happened? What if this Trojan program did more than copy the data? What if it changed something in the procedures or, God forbid, in the specifications? Paul might be halfway to the Moon and a bad command dumps all his fuel. We’d better make sure none of these systems are connected to the wireless on the ship.”

  “God, a wrong requirement could vent the cabin to vacuum,” Paul added.

  “Or God knows what else,” Chu said. “What we need is more work at this point. I can’t tell you about the launch or the safety of the vehicle until my team has had time to review the files and compare them with the backups. How do we know they weren’t compromised, too?”

  “The backups appear to be okay,” Jones said. “They’re stored on external drives and isolated from the computers here in Nevada. Before we bring any of them up, I want to have my team check the machines that host the backups and make sure they don’t have the same bug.” She carefully placed her cell phone on the table in front of her as she continued. “Gary, this scares the crap out of me. I’ve never seen anything like this—all of our computers had the Trojan embedded in the operating system. The OS is propagating the program everywhere. We’ve got to tell someone.”