Arkwright

by Allen Steele

  Then it fired off a message and waited for a reply.

  13

  It hardly needs to be said that I wasn’t the only one who was stunned by Dad’s return. When my mother walked into the living room to find her husband, whom she’d all but given up for dead, sitting there along with me and the two people who’d brought him back to Juniper Ridge, she didn’t do anything but stare at him with wide, unblinking eyes. Her mouth opened, shut, opened again; I could tell that she was having trouble breathing, let alone finding anything to say. She swayed back and forth on her feet, and for a moment, I was afraid that her legs would give out from under her. As I rose from the couch, though, so did my father from the armchair that had been his usual place many years ago.

  “Chandi … I’m home.” Stepping toward her, he started to raise his hands. “Honey … I’m so, so sorry. I—”

  “Don’t.” Her left hand shot up, palm open and facing outward. “Just”—she looked away, her hand trembling—“don’t. I don’t want…”

  “Mom?” I headed for her. “Mom, are you okay?” Stupid question. Of course she wasn’t okay.

  “No … no…” Looking away from both Dad and me, she wheeled about and staggered away. My mother never had a drink for as long as I knew her, but just then, she looked just the way Dad did those nights when he came home late from the Kick Inn. “Just … everyone, just leave me alone.”

  Then she was gone, stumbling back through the door from which she’d just emerged, heading back to the observatory, where she’d been until I’d made the awful mistake of asking her to come over to the house without telling her who was waiting for her. I wasn’t trying to be mean, and it wasn’t as if I’d meant to say, “Surprise! Look who’s home!” It was simply that I’d had no idea how to tell her that Dad had suddenly reappeared, and I decided that maybe it was best if she saw it for herself. Which only goes to prove that you can be intelligent and still be pretty stupid.

  I turned to Dad. He was still standing there, face as white as his hair had become, hands still raised to embrace his wife. He looked at me and said, “Dhani, I didn’t … I don’t…”

  “Shut up.” I’ve never hit anyone in my life, but in that moment, all I wanted to do was deck him. Somehow, I managed to control myself. “Sit down,” I said, pointing to his chair. “Now talk … no, wait.” I took a second to use my wrist phone to call Grandpa. “Come home at once,” I said when he answered. “Dad’s come back.” I didn’t wait for a reply but simply clicked off. “Okay … start talking.”

  “Perhaps it would better if I explained,” said the woman who’d shown up with my father. She and the air force officer were sitting on the other side of the room. “I’m Cassandra O’Neill, and this is Captain Philip Jensen, and we’re—”

  “No. Him first, and then you.” I didn’t even look at them; my attention was solely upon my father. “Go.”

  Dad dropped his hands and let out his breath, and then he slowly lowered himself into his chair. “Dhanishta, I don’t know where to begin, but…” He shook his head. “All right, I’ll try.”

  Fourteen years ago, he and the woman he’d met in town—it took a while for him to even speak her name, Sally Metcalfe—had taken off for what he originally thought would be no more than a few weeks, maybe a few months at most. Their destination was Denver, her hometown, where she’d told him that she still had friends, family, a job, and something like a future.

  But first, they decided to have a little adventure. After abandoning his car in Boston, they’d boarded the transtube and used it weave their way across the country, getting off the maglev every now and then to sample the nightlife in the places where they landed. In this way, they’d drifted from bar to bar, motel to motel, eating in crappy restaurants, nursing hangovers, doing all the things two people did when they were on a long binge and running away from whatever it was they had left behind.

  It may or may not have been fun, because Dad had little memory of that time. Blackouts were part of the ride, I guess. The next time he was able to think clearly at all, it was when he woke up to find himself in a jail cell in Denver, with no recollection of how he’d gotten there. Sally was gone, and somewhere along the line, his belongings had vanished, as well. He never saw her again.

  The biggest shock, though, was discovering that seven months had passed since the day he’d walked out of my life and my mother’s.

  Dad was picked up by the Denver cops after he was found on the sidewalk outside a downtown wino bar. Someone had taken his wallet and what little money he had left, so being charged with vagrancy and public drunkenness was only the least of his problems. He was homeless, and just to put the icing on the cake, he began to suffer the DTs within hours of waking up in jail.

  “Being taken to the hospital was probably the best thing that could have happened to me,” Dad said. “After I got out and had my day in court, the judge realized that I needed treatment more than jail time. So I was sent to a substance abuse center and—”

  “You’re still not telling me where you’ve been for the last fourteen years.” I didn’t mean to be cold, but I was becoming impatient with him. “Not to mention why you’ve picked this time to come back.”

  “Maybe I can answer those questions,” Grandpa said.

  He and Robert had come into the living room so quietly that I hadn’t noticed either of them. Dad looked around as he spoke. “Hi, Papa,” he said quietly. “Good to see you again.”

  “You’re looking better, son. Staying off the bottle, I hope?”

  “Clean and sober for thirteen years.”

  “Glad to hear it. And the new job’s working out?”

  “Well, it’s not so new anymore.” Dad smiled just a little. “I’ve been there about—”

  “Wait a minute!” I stared first at Dad and then Grandpa. “Am I getting this straight? You knew where he’s been all this time?”

  Grandpa slowly let out his breath. There were no vacant chairs left in the room, so he leaned against a wall, folding his arms across his chest. “Robert, do you think you could make some coffee, please? Thanks.” Robert nodded and left the room, and Grandpa went on. “I heard from your father shortly after he went into treatment. He wanted to come back, but I didn’t want to have a repeat of what happened here.”

  “Which is probably what would have happened,” Dad said. “If I’d returned, it would’ve been only a matter of time before I became a barfly again.” He couldn’t look at me as he said this. “I’m sorry, Dhani, but I’d hurt you and your mother enough already, so I took your grandfather’s advice and stayed away.”

  “I didn’t let either you or your mother know,” Grandpa said, speaking to me, “because you were both in a lot of pain, and it would take a long time for the wounds to heal. So I quietly kept in touch with him while he rebuilt his life, and when he was ready to leave the halfway house…”

  “I was there for two and half years. It took me a long time to get over drinking.” Dad paused, looking down at the floor again. “And when I did, I just couldn’t face either of you again. Not after what I’d done.”

  “So we decided that it was probably just as well if he made a clean break of it, started over again out west.” Grandpa was looking embarrassed, as well. Perhaps he’d never expected this day to come. “I called Win and Martha Crosby and asked them if they could find a job for him in California, and they managed to get him a staff position at UC–Davis.”

  My mouth fell open. “I almost transferred there!”

  “I know.” My father slowly nodded. “I was hoping that, once you did, I might be able to reconnect with you, get you back into my life again. But—”

  “I met Robert and stayed here.”

  “So I figured that perhaps it was just as well and kept my distance.” Again, he sighed. “Dhani, you don’t know … you can’t know … how hard it’s been. Even after I got straight, there hasn’t been a day that I don’t regret everything I did to you and your mother. But I was so afraid that, i
f I came back, I’d wind up in the Kick Inn again.”

  “Okay, so you stayed in California. Good for you.” I wasn’t ready to forgive him, but at least I understood his long absence a little better. Perhaps he was right. As hard as his departure had been for Mom, returning home only to start drinking again would have killed her. “But that doesn’t explain why you’ve picked this time to come home.” I glanced over at O’Neill and Jensen. “Who are these people, anyway?”

  “I’d like to know that myself,” Grandpa said.

  “This is where I come in.” Cassandra O’Neill cleared her throat. “Dr. Skinner, Ms. Skinner, Phil and I are with DARPA … perhaps you’ve heard of us?” I nodded, and she went on. “We belong to the special task force assigned to finding a way of deflecting Na before it hits Earth, and it’s because Matt got in touch with us that we’ve come out here.”

  Jensen spoke up. “Dr. Skinner neglected to mention what Matt has been doing in California the last decade or so. He’s been working with the Crosbys on applied high-energy research, contributing his knowledge of the Galactique Project to their efforts to develop alternate propulsion systems for the next generation of interstellar vessels. Ones large enough to carry living people.”

  “Specifically, we’re looking at the using outer system resources for fusion engines,” Dad said. “There have been proposals to extract helium-3 from Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Or maybe even Saturn’s; its radiation fields aren’t nearly as intense, so it would be easier to reach it. A high-power beamer like the foundation’s is an optimal way of getting there … we kinda leapfrogged over fusion when we built Galactique.”

  “There’s another application, as well,” O’Neill said. “It’s something of a long shot, but Win Crosby has calculated that it may be possible to use the foundation beamer to deflect Na. It’s a 120-terawatt system, after all—much more power than the 38-gigawatt beamer the consortium built.”

  Grandpa let out a low whistle. “I’ll be damned. Why the hell didn’t I think of that?”

  I didn’t say so, but I knew the reason. He’d had other things on his mind, like fretting over Galactique’s loss of telemetry and taking care of Mom, to think much about a microwave satellite he’d shut down the day I was born. “Does that thing even work?” I asked. “It’s been out of service for years.”

  “We sent a crew out there just last week to examine it,” Jensen said. “It needs some repair work, but otherwise, it’s still in operational condition. However, it can’t be reactivated or maneuvered except from here because—”

  “We’re the only ones who have the operating system,” Grandpa said.

  “Right. And that’s why I’ve come back.” Dad looked straight at me as he said this. “Once we get the beamer up and running again, we might be able use it to push Na just enough to nudge it from its current trajectory.” He shrugged. “I mean, it was built to boost a three-hundred-foot starship up to half the speed of light, so it should be able to shove a big, dumb rock just a few hundred feet. That’s all it would take, really.”

  “We may be able to do that, yes.” Grandpa slowly nodded as he looked away from us. “I think the three of us know enough about the beamer to get it to do what needs to be done. Isn’t that right, Chandi?”

  I looked in the direction he was gazing. Unobserved by any of us, my mother had come back into the house. I had no idea how long she’d been standing there or how much she’d heard; she said nothing, but instead stared at Dad with dark and haunted eyes. My father turned to gaze at her, and she visibly flinched when their eyes met, but she didn’t flee as I expected her to.

  “It’s possible,” she said so quietly that it was almost a whisper.

  14

  This was as close to a happy family reunion as we got. The knowledge that for every minute we wasted Na traveled another 450 miles meant that Grandpa, Mom, and I didn’t have time to reconcile our feelings toward Dad. Robert had barely returned to the living room with coffee before O’Neill and Jensen hustled us over to the dome so they could inspect the MC. One look at the antique computers Grandpa had been pampering for years because the foundation no longer had the money for regular upgrades, and O’Neill was on her phone. Late that evening, a USAF gyro touched down on the lawn outside the house, bearing state-of-the-art computers and the best technicians the Pentagon had to offer.

  From that moment, Juniper Ridge and the Galactique Project fell under military jurisdiction. No one was allowed to leave the premises, and all outside phone calls or email messages were screened. Jensen would have placed soldiers at a roadblock leading to the observatory if Grandpa hadn’t pointed out that doing so would have attracted the attention we didn’t want. Except for Joni, people seldom visited the observatory, but everyone in Crofton would have known something was going on if they’d seen military people swarming in. He reluctantly agreed that the low-key approach was probably the best, and that’s how we handled it. I went down the road and asked Joni and Brett to stay away for a few days; I didn’t tell them why, and they didn’t ask too many uncomfortable questions.

  Along with Jensen and O’Neill, my father was installed in the cottage, which had gone largely unused since the Crosbys moved out years earlier. I don’t think they saw much of the place, though. Along with Grandpa, they spent most of their time in the MC, working around the clock to help the technicians replace the old computers with the new ones and make sure the data and operating systems were successfully transferred from one to another. In the meantime, another group of technicians worked on the dish upstairs, restoring it to full operating condition. They napped in their chairs and gobbled down the sandwiches and soup Robert and I carried over from the house, and if there hadn’t been a restroom in the observatory, I think they would’ve been urinating in the bushes.

  At first, Mom kept her distance. She went up to her room and hid there for the first day, emerging only to go downstairs for a quick meal. But her memory of the beamer operating systems was sharper than my grandfather’s, so it was only a matter of time before Grandpa came over to the house, went upstairs to her room, closed the door behind him, and had a long talk with her. When he came out, Mom was with him. She’d put on a fresh change of clothes and pulled her hair back, and she didn’t say a word to Robert and me as she followed my grandfather over to the dome.

  Robert waited until they were gone and then turned to me. “If she tries to murder your dad, do you think the air force guys will stop her?”

  “They’d better,” I murmured. “I won’t.”

  When I went over to the MC a couple of hours later, though, I found Mom and Dad seated side by side at the master console, reading information to each other as they made their way through a complex checklist. They weren’t exactly holding hands, but for a moment, it almost seemed as if my father had never left. Then Dad’s elbow accidentally touched hers, and she immediately recoiled, and I knew that her forgiveness wasn’t likely to come anytime soon.

  By late that afternoon, the MC was back on line, this time with new computers and an operating system capable of handling the new information that had been uploaded from a NASA database. The irony couldn’t have been thicker. NASA had become little more than an office building in Washington, D.C., and the Arkwright Foundation had once been the target of a congressional investigation, but now the fate of the world rested upon a neglected federal agency and an impoverished nonprofit organization. It would have been sweet if Representative Dulle was still around to see this, but a heart attack had killed him a few years after his constituents voted him out of office.

  While this was going on, a space construction team had been working on the beamer itself, replacing the photovoltaic panels punctured by micrometeor impacts and upgrading the focusing elements. They finished their work just a few hours after the Juniper Ridge group finished theirs, and once they’d moved away, Mom and Grandpa ran a test to make sure that the beamer was once again capable of projecting a high-power microwave beam by aiming it at a small NEO that w
as passing Earth at a harmless distance of about three million miles. The beam was invisible, of course, but the satellite’s instruments registered it nonetheless; a few minutes after it fired, space telescopes detected a tiny dust plume rising from the asteroid’s surface.

  The beamer worked, but no one was ready to break out the champagne quite yet. Hitting a little NEO was one thing. Hitting Na, and having it do any good, was another. However, my father pointed out something that Win Crosby’s group had determined might be in our favor. Since Na was a class-C asteroid, it was very likely that deep beneath its crust lay primordial deposits of gaseous hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, perhaps even water ice. If the beam could penetrate the surrounding rock to heat these volatiles, it was theoretically possible that they might vent outward through the crust, therefore forming plumes that would help disturb Na’s trajectory.

  No one knew for sure whether this would be the case. But Comstock was still several days away from reaching Na, and this made Galactique’s beamer our best hope, if not our last. So my parents, Grandpa, and Cassandra O’Neill turned the beamer so that it was aimed at the asteroid, locked on to its position, and made sure that it was being precisely tracked.

  And then they fired the beam, and everyone on Juniper Ridge began holding their breaths.

  15

  You know the rest of the story. Or at least you may think you do, if you were alive at the time and remember hearing the news. But you weren’t there on Juniper Ridge, so you don’t. Here’s what I saw: