Arkwright

by Allen Steele

  “Now the Arkwright Foundation has found another means of fleecing the American taxpayer,” Dulle continued. “Get it to pay millions of dollars to support a space probe that was launched over twenty years ago. In essence, we’re being asked to spend money on an abandoned observatory occupied by the surviving members of the family who started the foundation in the first place, who use technical jargon and high-minded promises as a way of misappropriating taxpayer funds for their own use.”

  Dulle was staring straight at my grandfather when he said this, as if expecting his angry gaze to cause Grandpa to hide under the table. If so, he must have been disappointed. My grandfather listened with an amused smile and patiently waited until the congressman was done. Then the chair gave the floor to him, and Grandpa switched on his table mike and began his defense.

  Grandpa held his ground well. While maintaining a respectful tone, he managed to be just patronizing enough to sound like a respected scientist lecturing a political hack on the nuances of public policy. He pointed out that, while he appreciated the subcommittee’s interest in these matters, the fact remained that the principal figures in this investigation were long gone; Senator Wessen’s presidential campaign was a footnote in the history books, my great-grandmother Kate Morressy Skinner had passed away nearly twenty years ago, and they were not still around to defend themselves. He then went on to say that, under the federal laws of the time, nothing either of them had done was illegal. The Arkwright Foundation’s contributions to Senator Wessen’s PAC had been in the interest of a public servant whose social agenda the foundation agreed with; likewise, there had been no pressure on the senator to support the Galactique Project or introduce legislation that would make its launch operations more viable from Ile Sombre than if they had been conducted at similar facilities on American soil. The foundation’s investments had been completely legit, with the profits being wholly devoted to research and development of Galactique, and since most of those companies were no longer supporting the project’s operations in western Massachusetts, the foundation had been forced to request modest funding from the federal government.

  “This isn’t a free ride for us, Mr. Dulle,” Grandpa said. “This isn’t an attempt to fleece anyone. Galactique is an ongoing effort to expand the human presence into the cosmos, to establish a new home for our race. Until recently, the Arkwright Foundation has succeeded in doing this with the barest support from the American government. The money we’ve received from the National Science Foundation keeps the lights on in our Mission Control center and allows the three people who monitor the spacecraft to live there full-time. You’re welcome to visit us at any time, and you’ll see that we’re hardly in the lap of luxury.”

  It was a good defense. I thought Grandpa’s testimony was a superb takedown. But as he finished, my mother spoke up for the first time.

  “He’s right, you know,” she said quietly.

  “Of course he’s right.” I was grinning. “Grandpa kicked his—”

  “No, I mean he’s right.” She pointed to Dulle, who was taking a moment to study his notes. “He knows the truth. Ben’s just covering up.”

  I stopped grinning. “You’re saying the project’s just a scam? Mom, you know better than that.”

  She glared at me. “Of course it’s not a scam. I built Galactique with my bare hands, didn’t I?” She often said that, even though it technically wasn’t true. “But your great-grandmother told me the whole story after I married your”—she stopped herself before she could mention Dad, which she no longer did—“after I got married. Yes, the foundation bought off Wessen. The money was funneled through his PAC, but I bet he didn’t spend a dime of it on his campaign. Everyone knew he didn’t have a chance, anyway. He got knocked out of the race in the New Hampshire primary.”

  This was the first time in ages my mother had spoken much about anything except radishes and tomatoes, but I hardly noticed. “So you’re saying there really was a payoff?”

  “Senator Wessen was the best politician money could buy, and we had him in our pocket.” Then she smiled at me. “I think I’d like some tea, dear. Would you make some?”

  I didn’t know what else to say or do, so I got up from the couch, went into the kitchen, and put the teapot on the stove. I stood there for a long time, watching the steam slowly rise from the spout as I played with the teabag between my fingers. No one had ever told me any of this. Until a couple of weeks earlier, I’d never even heard of Senator Wessen. And while I could hardly blame my great-grandmother for doing what needed to be done in order to get Galactique off the ground, it was still disturbing to learn that the Arkwright Foundation had indulged in some rather sleazy tactics to achieve its goals.

  The subcommittee had begun to question Grandpa when I returned to the living room. Representative Dulle had distributed copies of Senator Wessen’s campaign records to the other members, and they were coming at my grandfather from all sides. Suddenly, Grandpa didn’t look so certain of himself. Behind him, Grandma sat stiffly in her chair. Although her face showed no expression, I could tell that she was nervous.

  “Better hope those guys don’t have the goods on us,” Mom said as I handed the tea mug to her, “or we’re screwed.”

  But they did. And we were.

  8

  The congressional investigation was the beginning of the end of federal funding for the Arkwright Foundation. Despite Grandpa’s best efforts, Dulle got his way. He had allies on both sides of the hill, and under pressure from the House and Senate, the National Science Foundation cut its appropriation, as meager as it really was. Once again, Juniper Ridge was on its own, but even as my grandparents scrambled to find a way to make up for the loss, worse things were happening far, far away.

  About the same time this was going on, Galactique was approaching a star system about midway to Eos: Gliese 832, an M-class red dwarf 10.5 light-years from Earth. This nameless little star didn’t have much going for it: a couple of gas giants, but no Earth-mass planets within its habitable zone. The ship would pass through the outermost reaches of the system, though, so the mission planners had decided to have the ship conduct a brief survey as it swept by, just in case there was anything there worth noting. Besides, it would give them a chance to calibrate the ship’s sensors and make sure they were functioning the way they were supposed to once Galactique reached Gliese 667C, even though it would take more than a decade for the results to reach Juniper Ridge.

  Galactique’s beamsail had long since ceased its primary function, but since then, it had become useful for something else—a shield against the interstellar dust that would have chewed the ship apart if the sail hadn’t been there. The sail was probably riddled with pinholes by the time Galactique made its flyby of Gliese 832, but it should have deflected anything that might have damaged the ship.

  It didn’t.

  We’ll never know exactly what happened, because the AI didn’t report a specific cause, so we can only guess. The most likely scenario is some bit of transient debris in the outer system—a tiny piece of a long-dead comet, a miniscule fragment of a stray object—came in an oblique angle that caused it to miss the sail entirely and, in a one-in-a-billion chance collision, hit the ship. It couldn’t have been very big, or else it would have destroyed Galactique; in fact, it may have been not much larger than a piece of gravel.

  Size doesn’t matter when it comes to something like this, though, because the effect was catastrophic. It knocked out communications with Earth.

  Galactique carried two 1,250-watt lasers, powered by the ship’s nuclear reactor and mounted side by side outside the service module. The reason for this redundancy was that, even if one laser went dead, the other would continue to function. Yet it wasn’t the lasers themselves that were hit but something else: the electrical bus that supplied juice to the array. That was in an exposed part of the service module outside the hull plates protecting the ship’s interior components. Perhaps the lasers should have been independently mounted, e
ach with its own bus, but no one can predict every possible contingency; we can’t blame the engineers too much for failure of foresight.

  In any case, our hypothetical little rock clipped the line. In that instant, Galactique went dark.

  The AI would have detected the problem immediately, if not the precise cause, and acted upon it. The array was withdrawn into the service module, where the spider-bots went to work on it. By the ship’s internal chronometer, the repair job probably took only a few days, but time dilation made it seem much longer to observers back on Earth. We didn’t even know about the accident for more than ten years.

  By then, a lot had changed back home.

  9

  I met Robert in the second semester of my sophomore year, which I’d originally intended to be my last hurrah at UMass. If it hadn’t been for him, I might have gone ahead with my original plan to transfer to UC–Davis and move out west.

  By then, I felt comfortable enough about matters at home to think about leaving Massachusetts and setting out on my own. Although the Galactique Project was no longer receiving federal funds, Grandma came up with the idea of turning the Arkwright Foundation into a publicly supported nonprofit, thus allowing them to sell memberships, conduct fund-raising drives, and otherwise do whatever it took to keep the MC open and maintain the communications lifeline with the ship (it would still be many years before we learned about the accident). My mother found a new pastime in running the foundation website, and Grandma took to writing a monthly newsletter that told the foundation’s supporting members what was happening on Juniper Ridge.

  Representative Dulle continued to harass us—not satisfied with depriving the Arkwright Foundation of NSF funding, he was also determined to have the Justice Department open its own civil investigation—but we were assured by the foundation’s attorney and our own congressman that he wouldn’t get far. With Senator Wessen’s buy-off decades in the past and the principal figures involved with the scandal long since deceased, no one was taking Dulle very seriously. The bastard got his pound of flesh, and he’d just have to be happy with it.

  The foundation was just scraping by, but Grandpa was confident it would survive. I came home for the summer and helped around the place, but already I was itching to leave. During my freshman year, I’d taken weekend trips with my friends to Boston and New York, where I’d gone on gondola rides through flooded downtown streets and caught plays at rooftop theaters. I’d seen a side of life far different from tiny little Crofton, and I wanted more of it. And although Mom still wanted me to stay close enough for her to feel as if I was safe from the sinister forces she persisted in believing were ready to pounce—Dulle had replaced the New American Congregation as her nemesis—Grandma assured me that she was getting along well enough that I didn’t need to be concerned about her. If I still wanted to go to California, no one would stand in my way.

  Then I met Robert.

  As these things sometimes happen, it was entirely accidental. Some oaf brushed up against me as I was leaving the serving line in the student union cafeteria and caused me to drop my tray. The carton of milk on it fell upon the shoes of the student behind me, and as I stammered my apologies, he stooped down to help me clean up the mess. I looked up and found a pair of quiet gray eyes regarding me with amusement and just a bit of interest. He put aside his own tray, asked me to wait a minute, and then went back into the line and replaced everything I’d lost, running his thumb across the scanner to pay for them. And then he asked if I’d join him for lunch.

  That was Robert Ignatz. Not Rob or Bob, and never Bobby—Robert. He was tall and kind of skinny, with a thatch of dark-brown hair that was comb resistant and a shyness that was almost as deep as my own. He was an art student studying holosculpture with a minor in industrial design, which is why we’d never shared a class. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for the cafeteria accident, we probably would have never met. Speaking to girls had always been a problem for him, so he took the fact that I’d soaked his shoes with milk as a heaven-sent opportunity to meet one.

  Hell if it didn’t work. Robert and I had lunch together, and when it was over, I gave him my number and let him know that I wasn’t doing anything special that weekend, and that was how things got started. I’d met a few guys during the last couple of years at UMass, but none were especially attractive. Indeed, most reminded me of Teddy Romero; ten minutes with them, and it was obvious what their intentions were. I’d begun to wonder whether I was a lesbian or destined to become a nun when I met Robert, who didn’t even try to take my hand until I took his first and nearly fainted when I stopped him on the sidewalk outside the theater where we went for our third date and told that I wouldn’t mind a kiss.

  Besides social awkwardness, Robert and I had a couple of other things in common. The first was little previous sexual experience. When we finally mustered the courage to go to bed together—I kicked my roommate out for the night; she didn’t argue, just went down the hall to shack up with her own boyfriend—I discovered that it didn’t matter very much that I’d only once before been with a guy, because that was one time more than my dear sweet Robert had been with a girl. But he was as tender as Teddy had been callous and also delightfully indefatigable. We didn’t sleep much that night.

  The second was that he’d also come from a broken family. His mother had left when he was young, and his father never seemed to care very much for him. Although they lived in Connecticut, he went back as little as he could; his dad considered the presence of a grown-up son to be an impediment to his new life as a roaming stud. So Robert had made the UMass campus his home, and he’d already decided that he’d remain in Amherst after graduation; he liked it there, and he already had a line on getting a job at an industrial design studio in Springfield, where he worked part-time as an intern.

  When he told me this, I knew that I was going to give up California. If the choice was between transferring to UC–Davis and or staying at UMass with Robert, then it was obvious which way I’d go. No regrets. By the second semester of our junior year, we’d left the dorms and found an off-campus apartment, and when we graduated a year and a half later, I walked away with a diploma under one arm and the other around my best friend, lover, and chosen companion for life.

  So I didn’t move out west but instead remained in New England. That’s another reason I was lucky to have met Robert. The decision to stay close to home changed my life when Na came.

  10

  Everyone who was alive at the time remembers where they were and what they were doing when the world learned of the existence of 2099 NA-2.

  I was twenty-nine years old, a science teacher at Amherst High, and living with Robert in a two-century-old farmhouse in the nearby town of Leverett. We’d never married and saw no real reason to do so; our relationship was solid, and since we both had parents whose marriages had ended badly, we didn’t want jinx things by repeating their mistake. Robert worked out of the house; his rising reputation as a holosculptor had enabled him to leave his job at the design firm a couple of years earlier to set up his own studio, where he earned a little extra money teaching students the fine art of painting with light. We had no children, but that was something we were considering; in the meantime, we were happy contributing to the education of other people’s kids.

  So I was in the faculty room between classes, having coffee and glancing over the homework my students had just sent me, when another teacher said, “Oh, my god, no!” I looked up. The wall screen was logged on to a newsnet, and the first thing I saw was something that looked like a fuzzy little white blob against a black background.

  From my childhood on Juniper Ridge, I’d learned to recognize a space telescope image when I saw it. My first thought was that it was a star or perhaps a newly discovered exoplanet somewhere many light-years from Earth. But it wasn’t either, and it was much closer than that. It was the monster we’d all come to know as Na.

  When it was first discovered four months earlier by Spaceguard’s orbital te
lescope, 2099 NA-2 appeared to be just another near-Earth object whose elliptical orbit would carry it past to our world. There are nearly countless NEOs like it, but the vast majority of them come no closer than the Moon. This particular asteroid was a little more than half of an astronomical unit from Earth when it was first spotted, and it was first believed that it would come no closer than the Moon; as a matter of routine, it was classified as a potentially hazardous object, worth watching but probably no more hazardous than any of the many PHOs discovered every year. Shortly after this particular asteroid crossed Mars orbit, though, planetary astronomers reexamined the data and came to the realization that it was much more dangerous than that. A Spaceguard alert team at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona was assigned to study 2099 NA-2, and what they found caused them to immediately contact their counterparts in Hawaii and ask them to confirm their findings. A few days later, the Maui observatory delivered its verdict, and it was grim indeed.

  First, 2099 NA-2 was on collision course with Earth. Traveling at 27,000 MPH, in two and a half months, it would sail straight into our planet.

  Second, and worse, this was a big asteroid. A class-C carbonaceous-chondrite rock shaped like a potato, it was about half a mile wide and a little more than a mile long—as newscasters would become fond of calling it, “a flying mountain” (the name Na came a little later; the phonetic pronunciation as “nah” was irresistible). It wasn’t going to be another dinosaur killer like the one that turned Tyrannosaurus rex into an interesting fossil, but nonetheless, June 17, 2099, was going to be a very bad day for every living creature on Earth.