The arms went back down. Many in the audience studied the displays in the armrests instead.
The first question came from a journalist who introduced herself and her employer. “Professor Agarwal, what purpose could this construction have?”
“We don’t know that.”
“It does have a purpose?”
“It must have been incredibly difficult to set up. Whoever accomplished that must have had some kind of justification for doing so.”
“Professor Agarwal,” came from a Japanese scientist whose name Alain had missed, “in our opinion it is likely that the construction influences solar activity. What do you think?”
“That is an obvious conclusion. The sun has activity patterns that are quite different from other stars of similar size. One could also say that mankind was lucky to have started out in the orbit of this particular star. Elsewhere a planet would have much less time in the habitable zone of a class G star, which means there would be much less time to develop life. Maybe this is no coincidence.”
“We are talking about extended periods of time,” said the Japanese astronomer. “If there was a motivation to support Earth in the development of life, the constructor must have been thinking in eons.”
“Absolutely,” replied Agarwal. “I must add that this is pure speculation. Our scientific observation of the sun does not date back long enough to be able to prove atypical behavior.”
“Could it be a weapon of some kind, Professor?” asked an American reporter.
“There isn’t much of anything that someone could not also use as a weapon. Human history has ample proof of that. But we can exclude the possibility of humans having constructed this. Our technology will need several thousand years to achieve the necessary level.”
“Other civilizations may be as belligerent as humans,” the reporter followed up.
“We don’t know anything about that. Personally I believe that civilization, the more it progresses, understands more and more that force does not solve problems. To get to the bottom of your question, I’ll admit that anybody who controls solar activity also controls Earth. A reduction of just one percent in the solar energy received by our planet would provoke a new Ice Age. Such action would always be directed against all of mankind as it is impossible to impact a single nation or region.”
“Michael Cunningham, NASA.” The man looked more the administrative type than a researcher. “How do you plan to proceed with researching this discovery? What do you think makes sense?”
“I am glad that you are asking that, Mr. Cunningham,” responded the DKIST director with a broad smile. “Right now we have nothing on Earth with which to investigate the phenomenon. While we have telescopes with sufficient resolution, they are unsuitable for observing the sun. It would make sense to pack a solar telescope in a spaceship and check out the construction, or whatever it is, from nearby.”
“Could we utilize the duplicate of the solar probe that made the original imagery?”
“Unfortunately, not if we want to obtain new knowledge, Mr. Cunningham. We got what we could out of that probe. We need a new mission, preferably a manned mission. We need to take into account that someone might have to enter the construction.”
“What is the rush about?”
The hall got restless, probably because the NASA administrator was on his third question. Cunningham sensed the dissatisfaction and turned around apologetically.
“Last question,” he said.
“As a civilization, we simply can’t afford not to investigate a huge construction of unknown origin that was built around the very star that makes our planet habitable.”
A few people broke into applause. The NASA representative sat down.
A young lady from a Nigerian University was next to be handed the microphone. “Could you explain the algorithms that were used to process the probe recordings?”
Agarwal launched into a technical explanation that Alain could not follow. He decided to log out of the event. The world was turning at breakneck speed. The other day he was talking to Arthur Eigenbrod about his suspicions, and now scientists were rooting for an expedition to the sun. Could things like this really happen in his lifetime? He took off the VR glasses and returned to the safety of his apartment.
The phone rang. It was a Paris number. Alain accepted the call.
“Arthur Eigenbrod here. Alain, can we meet today? I am happy to come and visit you in your apartment.”
“Yes, feel free to come. Unfortunately I don’t have any cake, though.”
“No problem at all. In half an hour?”
“I will be here.”
The call dropped. Alain went to the window to close the curtains. Looking out of the window, he spotted a camera team getting out of an e-taxi.
May 2, 2074, Earth Orbit
“I am so sorry, Heather.”
Huh? “Excuse me?” Odd way to start a conversation, she thought. “What do you mean?”
“The invitation. It looks like it won’t work out,” said Callis.
“What a pity. The cuisine up here leaves a lot to be desired. But what brings you to the Ark?”
“It’s all Alain Petit’s fault. NASA is planning a solar mission thanks to him.”
“I’ve heard about that. That decision was made incredibly quickly.”
“By order of the President. We need to find out whether this thing up there is a threat to the American nation.”
“Of course. You will manage, no problem.”
“Me? According to my information, you are part of the team, Heather.”
She felt herself go cold. She had not spoken with her boss since the conference. “I am still counting on leaving tomorrow. I don’t even have a change of clothes with me.”
“The Ark can provide whatever you need.”
“And my daughter?”
“She is grown up and will cope alright.”
Heather felt steamrollered. She hated being pushed around. But Callis was just delivering the message. It was not his fault at all.
“Well, it is great to have you here. At least now I know one person up here and don’t need to eat alone in the canteen.”
“What about Karl Freitag? Doesn’t he take care of you? I had insisted on that being his personal responsibility.”
“He does alright. He seems to be on the job around the clock. I haven’t seen him in the canteen yet.”
“Okay, well, I am here now.”
“That is great, Callis.”
They met in a room that had less than 70 square feet. Callis seemed to be in a rush and started the meeting without further ado. Zero gravity didn’t require seats, which allowed up to half a dozen people to attend in the tiny meeting space. Karl Freitag introduced two young women as engineering students who were participants in a trainee program on the Ark.
Callis tapped on a device and one of the walls turned into a large screen.
“I am Callis John for those who don’t know me, and I will be the project manager for our little mission over the course of the next few weeks.”
A schematic showed up on the screen. “These are the components that will make up our spaceship,” explained Callis.
Heather saw something that looked like a huge black coffin, which seemed disconcertingly appropriate. Behind it trailed a wild jumble and an object that looked like a propulsion unit.
“The elements in the drawing are further apart than in reality,” pointed out Callis. “Let’s look at what we have.”
The black coffin blinked.
“The most important component, our heat shield. Essentially this is a block of carbon fiber foam, 60 centimeters thick.”
Not a coffin, then, thought Heather.
“The heat shield is being built in the Ark shipyard using nanotechnology. We expect to have it ready in a week.”
One of the students asked, “Doesn’t that have to wrap around the ship somehow?”
“No, the heat transport is mostly by radiation in the
areas we will be concerned with. To be in the shade will be sufficient. As a result, the heat shield will always be between the ship and the sun. The shield will heat up to a few thousand degrees but it can cope with that. To reduce heat conduction to the ship, we can take out connecting elements in flight.”
“And how do we observe the solar surface?” asked Heather.
“Great question. The shield guarantees the sun not seeing us, so we don’t see it either. Unless we peek around the corner with a telescope once in a while.”
“Like a submarine that extends a periscope?” asked Karl.
“Yes, pretty much like that. We can only peek for a second, but that should be sufficient.”
So the ship was flying mostly blind, hands in front of its eyes, checking once in a while to see if a turn was in order. That certainly sounds less than reassuring, thought Heather.
“The ship itself is mostly boring. A few standard modules we’ll snag from the Ark,” Callis continued.
“We are glad to help out,” commented Karl.
“That leaves the propulsion unit. Once more we need to lean on the Ark and borrow one of the Direct Fusion Drives.”
“Not happy about that,” noted Karl, “but go ahead if you must…”
“Does the ship even need such strong propulsion? It must be falling into the sun anyway?” asked the other student.
“Earth moves around the sun at around 30 kilometers per second. That would be the starting velocity of our ship, too. To get closer to the sun we need to reduce speed quite a bit. And to return we need to get the speed back up to 30 kilometers per second. The DFD will handle that easily.”
“And how long will all of this take?” asked Heather.
“That depends on what we find, but I would expect about three months.”
May 3, 2074, Mercury
The bosses back on Earth were suddenly in a rush. And the ‘impossible’ of before had become the rule now. The entire base camp had been instructed to support him in building the radio telescope. That ended the long drives in the rover. He shared shifts on the pulley post with a technician. The rover taxied autonomously between there and the installation location where two other colleagues camped out. They would unload the rover, order it to return, and then install the fresh equipment.
Artem stood beside a stack of receiver modules. Their improvised cable car took an hour to transport one of them. It wouldn’t be much longer before that part was completed. Unfortunately there was only one rover in the camp, but that was the company’s fault. Artem had requested a second one months ago but the budget did not allow for it. Then. The base on Mercury didn’t even pay for itself, no room for luxuries like that, had been the official justification. Now it was too late. Shipping would have taken too long all by itself.
The reason for the sudden rush, Artem and the other crewmembers had agreed after some discussion, was the postulated construction recently discovered on the sun, even if nobody would confirm it officially. With a little luck their proximity to the sun would give the RB Group an advantage. Assuming their project had better resolution than any telescope on Earth, they would be the first to know what had been built around the sun. And knowledge was power, or money, or both. Was there even a difference?
The magic number right now was 34. If the rover didn’t break down, they could finish installing that many more modules in two weeks. The boss had implored them to find a way to do it in one. He offered a full year’s salary as a prize to anyone who could figure out how to get it done that quickly. It had to be important for the conglomerate.
But Artem thought it might be rather longer than shorter. The rover simply wasn’t made for 24x7 operations—200 kilometers per unit, that was 6,800 kilometers to go. After every 1,000 kilometers a thorough checkup was mandatory. The last ones had been skipped to save time already. Of course they had tried to load more than one module at a time, but the modules were so big and heavy that the rover would not arrive at its destination.
To have his peace back was more important to Artem than a fat bonus. Money didn’t talk at all up here. He couldn’t even buy a woman’s attention here. He had tried with a technician only to have her boot make painful contact with his knee. That left saving for his retirement. That would never happen anyway—some crazy assignment would kill him, he was sure of that.
Artem looked down into the crater. It would be another half hour before the next module arrived up here. He longed to roll a cigarette, take his time smoking it, and throw the glowing stub down the cliff into the darkness below. The Kandinsky Crater spread out below him. Their base camp was too far to spot but he could see the two spaceships that sparkled in the sun, the transport barge and the ‘yacht’ for personnel. He had arrived with the freight barge, how long ago, exactly?
Wait a minute, he thought. They did have transport that was faster than a rover!
“Artem calling base camp.”
“Yes, Artem? Mikhail here.”
“I wanted to officially register an idea on how to get the modules on site faster.”
“If you are looking at the spaceships, you probably are the penultimate person to click on that.”
“At least I’m not the last.”
“The last human you are. Sobachka is the only other one.”
“Haha, very funny. So why won’t the ships work?”
“Not enough fuel.”
“How is that?”
“They are here for a reason, but who am I telling that to? You know that better than me, so don’t waste any more of my time.”
“Please spell it out for me.”
“Okay. Take the freight barge that lifts raw materials into orbit. It takes off, is unloaded and refueled in orbit, and lands again. You get it, Artem?”
“You are telling me it can’t land without refueling?”
“Exactly, you smart aleck.”
“Then we change the procedure.”
“You are getting on my nerves, Artem.”
“I know, but we do have two ships.”
“That changes nothing. Okay, we might refuel the barge with the fuel from the yacht so it might land again. So we load the modules, it lands and then it is empty and we don’t get it back up, ever again. The yacht being empty as well.”
“That would be the situation if the barge didn’t consist of two stages.”
“Two stages? Sure, but what does that do for us?”
“A world of difference. Here is my plan: We fill the first stage of the barge with the fuel from the yacht. Then we load as many modules as we can into the first stage. It just needs to land safely. The second stage goes into orbit. The supply ship fills the hold with fuel. For the first stage, and the yacht, and itself.”
“That could work. But it would be a hell of a mess,” Mikhail said after a pause. “You’ve never transferred fuel, have you?”
“Of course I have. I always stole fuel for my own ship.”
“I believe that, Artem.”
“So you’ll pass the idea to the boss?”
“Will do. But there is no guarantee that we’ll really save a week. We don’t know how many modules fit. No room for issues, either.”
“Tell the rover. The right rear wheel bearing is running hotter than the rest. Besides, I am not in this for the money.”
“Rather?”
“I want my fucking peace.”
May 4, 2074, Mercury
He really had a talent for getting himself the worst job possible. Mikhail had been right, transferring fuel was a hell of a mess. Odd that he hadn’t remembered it that way. The problem was compounded by not having the proper tools. They were mining, not operating a gas station. So he had to improvise. And that was not so easy with liquid fuel. It was incredibly cold and incredibly liquid, plus the spacesuit made it harder, and he had to bridge a hundred meters between the ships.
Liquid oxygen, the first component, was the lesser issue. The flexible tubes were well insulated and had a strongly reflective coating against s
olar radiation. Keeping below minus 183 degrees Celsius wasn’t a challenge at all. But liquid hydrogen was a real headache. Hydrogen has its practical side, because it creates a high specific momentum on combustion. But there was also its boiling point to consider, just 21 degrees above absolute zero—minus 252 degrees Celsius. Mercury was simply too warm—even in the shadows temperatures ranged between minus 160 and minus 180.
Since both ships stood in the sun, he first had to shade things from sunlight. In the total absence of wind, it had been sufficient to put up a tarpaulin. His engineering studies came in handy for the second step. It had been a while, but he remembered learning some cooling technologies. He borrowed a compressor from the mining team to pressurize the tubes. Toward the end of the line the pressure would drop, and that was intentional. The expansion would cool down and liquefy the hydrogen that had evaporated during transport thanks to the Joule-Thompson effect.
That was the theory. Artem connected the last part of the tubes to the hydrogen tank of the barge. Next he walked the hundred meters over to the yacht, started the compressor, and opened the valve. Opening the valve was a remote operation that he launched via his pad. The command went through the computer on the yacht and he noticed the compressor vibrations change as his pad confirmed the opening of the valve. A few seconds now and pressure would be dropping in the source tanks. A warning message popped up to confirm that, so everything was running smoothly! Artem walked back to the barge. Initially mostly hydrogen gas would be arriving—the tubing had to cool down sufficiently first. He logged into the barge computer. The receiving tank was still empty.
Artem ignored the looming lethal danger. Some loss of hydrogen and oxygen always occurred. If the escaping gases were to mix in the right ratio near the ship, any odd spark would start an explosive reaction. The gas would turn to water and he’d be distributed across the surrounding area. No, that wouldn’t happen. Hydrogen and oxygen got along well together, mostly. And there was lots of space around him—why should the gas create a cloud near him instead of spreading all over Mercury? Besides, that initial spark to set it all off was missing. No, his construction was rather creative, and pretty quick and dirty, but not all that dangerous.
Silent Sun: Hard Science Fiction Page 9