by Homer Hickam
“Why doesn’t he fire his lasers?” Puckett asked one of them.
“Man, Starbuck’s way past that,” the girl said with disdain. “Anybody can blast rocks. He’s fighting the machine, man.”
“But the object of the game is to shoot up things, isn’t it? Don’t you get points for that?” Puckett pointed at the score shown at the lower right of the screen. It said 0.00.
“If you’re up to master and that’s it, sure,” the girl said, her arms crossed and her eyes never leaving the screen. “Starbuck’s a universal deity class. They play the game different.”
“Yes,” Puckett said dryly. “I suppose a universal deity might.” He was in a hurry, deity or no. He tapped the man on his shoulder. “Excuse me, Mr. Starbuck? I need to talk to you.”
Starbuck ignored him and kept his hands flying from joystick to guide ball and back again. Finally, the screen pulsed into a rainbow of colors and then a hot white light descended abruptly to black. YOU... the screen said, ARE... GOD. The scene changed, the alien warships lined up in honor, a trackless road opening up that seemed to lead to the stars. There was a tinny trumpet fanfare. ALL HAIL.
Starbuck turned in his seat, squinting up through thick wire-rimmed eyeglasses. “Whatcha want?” he demanded.
“Norio Starbuck?”
“Depends. Who’re you?”
“I’m Carl Puckett. I’d like to give you a job.”
Starbuck peered around the cluttered room, finally settling on the manager, who was watching him. “I have a job and it was damned hard to come by.”
Puckett laughed. “Custodian at a video game parlor? Scraping chewing gum off plastic seats? I believe I can give you a better job than that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. The perfect job for a deity of the universe.”
Starbuck heaved his bulk out of the bucket seat. “Tell me about it.”
“Can we go somewhere I don’t have to yell?”
Starbuck led the way to a cashier’s booth where it was marginally quieter. “Okay. What’s up?”
“What do you remember,” Puckett asked furtively, “about Project Farside?”
Starbuck studied him. “Everything. But who’s asking?”
Puckett produced his fake White House and NASA identification cards. It showed him to be a “special consultant.” “Good enough for you?”
Starbuck studied the cards. “You’re one of the bastards who shut us down.”
Puckett shrugged and then said, “What would it take to activate Farside again?”
“That depends. What for?” Starbuck asked suspiciously.
“Farside is needed for service to this country,” he said gravely.
Starbuck cocked his head, a gesture of suspicion. “With all due respect, Mr. Puckett, you’ll have to be more specific than that,” he said. “Activating an old piece of hardware and software would be extremely difficult, take a lot of my time. I’m not sure it could be done, tell you the truth.”
“Too bad. You’d have made a lot of money,” Puckett said.
Starbuck grinned. “You got a car?” he asked eagerly.
Bingo. “I have, Mr. Starbuck, a limousine.”
“Beats the bus.” Starbuck whistled between his teeth. “Hey, boss? Go screw yourself. I’m outtahere.”
The manager shook his head. “You’ll be back.” He turned his attention to a balky game.
Starbuck slid inside the limo, kneaded the black leather seats, and hummed appreciatively. “Nice,” he said. At Starbuck’s direction the limousine worked its way out of San Jose and onto the freeway to Sunnyvale.
Puckett sat in the seat opposite Starbuck and used a switch on the door to roll up the window between the passenger compartment and the front, sealing off their conversation from the driver. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, ready to tell the lie as he had been instructed. “We found out about Farside from one of your former managers. He’s retired now and shall remain nameless. He called my employer for patriotic reasons, said Farside might come in handy considering the present situation with the shuttle. I was dispatched to look you up.”
Starbuck nodded. “Figured as much. I caught Larry King last night. You’re messing around with a black project here, Mr. Puckett, but I guess you know that.” He cocked his head, as if wondering if Puckett had understood him. “A lot of the old Strategic Defense Initiative budget was hidden in black projects, ones that were kept from even the most exalted government bean-counters. But Project Farside was black for more than the budget busters. It was also, by international treaty, illegal. When SDI was canceled, we who were working Farside had already deployed hardware for testing.” Starbuck shrugged. “Since we were told to shut down immediately, we had no choice but abandon the test articles in place.”
Puckett smiled. “And that place I understand, Mr. Starbuck, was very far from earth.”
“Yes.”
There was one thing about Starbuck that bothered Puckett. “Why did you change your name?” he asked.
“Kamigaichi was too hard to say at the plant. Starbuck had a ring to it, you know? Star Wars, Starbuck. I just liked it. Mom still hasn’t forgiven me. Dad understood, though.”
At Sunnyvale, Puckett cracked the window enough for Starbuck to direct the driver to turn toward the mountains. Across the river and into the first patch of forest was a house built of pine logs, a big rambling design with an attached garage. Starbuck directed the driver into the driveway. “My dad built it. He was first generation. He thought if he lived in a log cabin it would make him feel more American. He died three years ago. Mom’s visiting relatives. I take care of the place. My stuff’s in the basement.”
Starbuck led the way to his “stuff.” The basement proved to be a large carpeted room, apparently meant to be a game room or a den. Instead, metal cabinets, computer disk drives, monitors, and consoles were jammed inside.
“Farside,” Starbuck explained sadly, “or what’s left of it. I bought all the equipment when they had the surplus sale. Cost me about ten thousand dollars. Cost the government maybe fifty million, just for the hardware. The software? Shit, who knows? I’m guessing a billion, easy. I kept a copy of it too.”
“Why?”
Starbuck shrugged. “I felt like it. Me and the guys invested five years of our lives in Farside and then we got orders to close down, and I mean down, in one day. That hit kinda hard. I didn’t want to let go, I guess.”
“Can you get Farside going again, Mr. Starbuck?”
Starbuck surveyed the jumbled stacks of equipment. “I’d need about ten of my guys and full access to all five active NASA data and relay satellites. And,” he concluded, “the usual supplies.”
“Ten people to help you set up the equipment?”
“No. I could do that with two. But I need software geeks—good, fast ones. Ten’s the minimum I can get by with. Farside’s a test project. The software aboard is for specific objectives. We’ll need to change that. What will be our new objective, by the way?”
“Stop Columbia, of course.”
“Piece of cake. Destroy or disable?”
Puckett hesitated. “That far out,” he said, “what would be the difference?”
“Good point. All right. One million dollars per man. And I’ll need discs, tapes, upgrades all around. The technology has already changed enough in two years to make all the difference. That’ll be another couple million or so. Just give me a government purchase order authorization and I’ll go out and get what I need. Lucky this is Silicon Valley or it would take weeks to pull it all together. As it is, I know just where to go. There’s a ton of old SDI stuff sitting around, plus compatible upgrades.”
“Forget the purchase orders. We’ll deal in cash. You got a bank account?”
“No, but I can open one.”
“Okay. Give me your account number and bank as soon as you know it. Here’s my card. Just use the pager and I’ll get right back to you.” Puckett stopped and considered for a moment. “A milli
on dollars per person?”
“Five million for me. One for the rest. Take it or leave it. The guys all have jobs they’ll have to quit.”
“You mean high-paying jobs like the one at the arcade, Mr. Starbuck?”
“Take it or leave it, Carl.”
“Three for you, and five hundred K each for the rest,” Puckett said, parrying. He’d been given a budget, and got to keep what was left over.
“Three mil and five hundred K? Okay, that’s a deal.” Starbuck shoved a console into a corner and perused the other equipment, trying to figure out where everything would go.
Puckett ran his hand over his bald head, his walrus mustache twitching. He was calculating his profit. It ran to millions. He stifled a grin. “All right. But forget the NASA comm satellites. I’ve been told to tell you we can’t use anything NASA or any other federal agency would know about. Do you get my drift?”
Starbuck peered through his thick glasses, speculatively. “You’re not asking me to do anything illegal, are you, Mr. Puckett?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Starbuck shrugged. “I wasn’t worried. Just wondering. All right. We’ll use commercial commsats. Bounce around between them to throw off what we’re doing. It’ll cost you, though.”
“Okay. Let me know how much,” Puckett said.
“That’s the spirit,” Starbuck said cheerfully. “I guess you want me up and running in two days?”
“One,” Puckett said. “Intercept them before they get to the moon.”
“Can’t do it that fast. I’ve got some checkouts to do first. Give me two days and I’ll still be able catch them before they complete their first lunar orbit. But go get the money, Carl, or I won’t make even that.”
Starbuck heard the faint sounds of Puckett’s limo leaving. He took off the white coverall. He was wearing shorts and a Star Wars T-shirt underneath. In one corner of the den was a console he’d set up with a partial software load. He had long since figured out how to break into NASA’s TDRS satellites when there wasn’t a shuttle in orbit. With Endeavour down, and Columbia not likely to be using it, he called up his program. It spun through its numbers and then advised that TDRS number three, southwest quadrant, was open for business. Starbuck sent a password through the small parabolic dish on his garage roof and then followed up with another command. The TDRS received it and flashed the coded signal in the general direction of the moon.
In two and a half seconds he received a double-lined stripe across the screen and an icon of a sword and shield. Farside was awake.
Starbuck’s fingers flew across his computer keyboard while he visualized the devices he was sending greetings to. Five Farside canisters sat behind the moon. Starbuck remembered seeing them before they were shipped to the Cape for launch. Only one meter long and a half meter wide, they looked like tiny plastic jet skis but they were each a sophisticated marvel. Inside each was an array of miniaturized infrared and heat sensors, a compact hypergolic propellant rocket engine, hydrazine vernier and cold nitrogen steering jets, a box of solid state artificial intelligence including an attached logical computer that allowed autonomous operations, and a nose cone consisting of two video cameras behind aluminized semitransparent covers that looked like eyes. The canisters had been dubbed “BEMs” early on in their design—bug-eyed monsters.
The first complement of BEMs had been blasted into space aboard a Titan IV booster that had also carried a Lacrosse imaging radar satellite. Starbuck had heard that intelligence communities around the world had noted the launch, suspecting either a Lacrosse or a Keyhole as the payload. As expected, their radars concentrated on the bulk of the payload, the Lacrosse, and took little note of the scattering debris usually associated with a deploying satellite. Part of the debris, however, had been the BEMs, each deliberately sent outward by tiny puffs of their maneuvering systems into higher and higher orbits until gravity breakaway could be made. Starbuck chuckled at the deception as his fingers continued to peck away at the keyboard.
The deception had continued. A direct Hohmann transfer was not attempted, since the flotilla might be spotted along the traditional route. Instead, the BEMs were sent to the earth-sun-moon gravity boundary a million miles out and then eased back until captured by lunar gravity. It was a trajectory mathematically postulated but never previously attempted, the three-body, or “fuzzy-boundary,” path to the moon. It took six months for the canisters to reach their destination but the theory worked perfectly, and as far as Starbuck was aware, no prying intelligence agencies ever had a clue.
Starbuck succeeded in activating the visual software, brought up representations of the BEMs and their location around the moon. He’d need the help of the others to make the graphics better, but this would do for now. He peered at the monitor, saw that, as suspected, most of the BEMs were positioned about ten thousand miles out from the lunar far side, the moon always between them and earth.
Starbuck had directed the games the BEMs had played with one another, some zipping out and slamming back to offer themselves as targets, some acting as hunter-stalkers. Others simply detonated themselves in acts of selfless self-destruction to allow their makers understanding of how debris distributed itself in space. To avoid detection the signals Starbuck had sent to the BEMs were embedded in data streams shunted back and forth between a half-dozen communications satellites in high geosynchronous orbit. Data streams coming back from the little monsters were sent out in nanosecond bursts on varying frequencies to a tiny commsat in orbit around the moon, which retransmitted in equally brief bursts to sensitive receivers positioned at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
Another Titan IV, with only a mockup of a Keyhole aboard, sent out a second flotilla. For nearly a year Starbuck and his software people in Silicon Valley had played their computer games, and their advancements had been astonishing. The BEMs had proved to be more than brilliant. They were nasty little geniuses. If deployed, Starbuck believed they might have provided a missile-free safety zone over any area of the earth desired. With Farside so successful other SDI weapons followed the BEMs to the moon, all using the fuzzy-boundary route. In their turn the weapons were tested and the software honed.
Then, when the Cold War ended, everything was abruptly shut down, all Farside workers on the streets. Starbuck remembered that day, still felt the anger and frustration that had welled up inside of him. Now, finally, he was going to be able to bring Farside alive again, prove what it could do.
Starbuck peered at the representations of the BEM canisters and picked one out, number XJ-249, commanded it to transfer to a ten-degree lunar equatorial orbit, one hundred miles above the surface.
Starbuck imagined what happened next. The white canister would split and XJ-249 would emerge like a butterfly from its pupae, sensors switching themselves on and taking note of the environment. Its artificial intelligence would probably be puzzled. It had been commanded to search but it would find nothing of interest nearby. Its logic would work through the probabilities, adding and subtracting the odds, but would come up with no satisfactory answer. The flood of data streaming back to Starbuck told him XJ-249 was immediately fooled by the earth coming over the lunar horizon, and briefly considered firing at the planet, thinking it a large blue warhead. But when it received no return from its short-range radar, it thought again and then looked away after registering the object in its memory.
Starbuck wasn’t concerned. XJ-249 did not have free will, so its logic exercise was just that—an exercise. The Farside software grunts had placed a manual override on everything the BEMs did. It could not attack anything unless that override was removed. Starbuck sat back in his chair, imagining XJ-249 soaring easily over the tortured lunar surface, an impulsive hornet easily angered, itching to get out from under its override.
Starbuck watched the numbers on his screen. “Hi, baby,” he whispered. “It’s God.”
THE ARMSTRONG SEA
Columbia
“Where are we, Medaris?” Pen
ny asked, coming up beside him in the cockpit. She poised her pen over a notebook.
Jack put aside the procedures manual for the moon landing module and regarded her. “I didn’t think you were talking to me.”
“I’m not. I’m asking you a question. Where are we?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I’m keeping a log.”
Jack looked around, shrugged. “Cislunar space.”
“I knew you’d have some bland engineering term for it.”
Jack frowned at her. “That’s what it’s called.”
Penny finished her jotting and gave Jack a smug smile, then pushed off, sailing back to the middeck. Jack turned to watch her feet disappear down the hatch. “That’s what it’s called!” he said defensively.
Jack went after some coffee. Penny was working on her cell culture samples. “Armstrong Sea,” she said to him as he mixed up a bag of coffee at the rehydration station.
“What?”
“We should call where we are the Armstrong Sea instead of cislunar space. After the first man who walked on the moon.”
Jack snorted. “High Eagle, cislunar space is a precise term. Why do you want to call it some name?”
“So it makes sense.”
“It makes perfect sense already.”
“For you”—Penny smiled—”which does not surprise me in the least. Is that coffee? Can I have it?” She took it from him while he stared at her. She inserted a straw. “This is awful stuff.”
“Sometimes,” Jack said, “you really irritate me.”
“I do? Could you let me know when that happens?”