Energized

by Edward M. Lerner

  Doctor of what? But Ellen had vetted the woman, supposedly, and he had a flexible day coming up. “I have some time open next Monday morning. Will fifteen minutes suffice? Telecon, or will you be coming to my office in Maryland?”

  “Fifteen minutes?” She laughed. “Not even close, and anyway, you need to come out here. But Monday works.”

  “Why there—and where is that, by the way?”

  “Here is the Green Bank Observatory. And why here? Trust me, it’ll make sense when you see the place.”

  Could she be any stingier with information? He had neither the time nor the inclination to play twenty questions. “I’ve got to go,” he told her. “I’ll get back to you.”

  “I’ll be here,” she said, and broke the connection.

  * * *

  His datasheet folded in quarters because that took less effort than clearing the table, eating (and trying not to taste) a nuked frozen dinner, Marcus sampled the news. In one window headlines scrolled, an all-too-familiar litany of scattered blackouts, spot gasoline shortages, and layoffs. The Russian-led cartel had announced a production cut, sending oil futures up ten dollars a barrel. A credit-rating service and a large hospital chain were the latest to disclose that hackers had compromised their customer files. Across the Middle East and Central Asia, more terrorist bombings and sectarian slaughter. In a streaming-video window—for the third day, but still telegenic—squadrons of Resetter activists disrupted construction of a new offshore liquefied-natural-gas terminal near Newark.

  Enough, he decided. A few sharp taps on the periphery of the datasheet banished the depressing news and put a virtual keyboard in their place. He started to surf.

  The Green Bank Observatory was in Green Bank, West Virginia, which was in the middle of nowhere. Deeper into the middle of nowhere, nonsensical as that was, than he had guessed. Run by the National Science Foundation.

  And Valerie Clayburn, Ph.D.? He found her, too. More than enough to beg the question what an up-and-coming astronomer wanted with him. Presumably not for any insight he might offer into distant galaxies or dark energy, or whatever was the hot topic in radio astronomy these days.

  Marcus went for a walk to clear his head. The evening breeze was pleasantly cool. Lawn sprinklers muffled the drone of traffic. In most front yards, the cherry trees were in bloom, just past their peak. Even in the many yards with FOR SALE and FORECLOSURE signs. And overhead …

  Urban glow and the crescent moon had all but washed the stars from the sky. Phoebe was too dark to see even during the rolling blackouts. Phoebe’s sunshield was for the moment essentially edge-on to him, and so also invisible. But The Space Place sparkled, the brightest “star” in the sky; it put even Venus to shame. The orbiting hotel complex, its surface silvered for cooling, was its own best advertisement.

  When he won, say, two lotteries, or struck oil in his backyard, he would be sure to book a stay.

  As for the nearly completed powersat, Marcus searched in vain. Alas. He would have welcomed some evidence that his life entailed more than meetings and talk.

  When he had called Ellen from his car to ask about her curious referral—and to vent about that afternoon’s waste of time at State—his boss, in very few words, speaking more in sorrow than in anger, had shocked Marcus into silence. Hours later, her rebuke still stung: “Have you considered the possibility that someone else might know something?”

  Yeah, he had. Only cynic that he had become, it had been a while. Since Lindsey.

  By the dim glow of a neighbor’s post lamp he texted the enigmatic Dr. Clayburn. CU Monday a.m. around 11.

  Monday, April 17

  The road trip to Green Bank began painlessly enough, the morning warm and sunny. The observatory banned electric vehicles because they might cause interference, so Marcus had a government motor-pool car and full tank of gas. The car’s data link kept dropping out. After twenty miles he gave up on his e-mail.

  The first half of his drive, more than a hundred miles, was Interstate, and autodrive did all the work. Leaving behind the D.C.-area sprawl the scenery was gorgeous, especially as he crested the Blue Ridge, the Shenandoah Valley, lush and green, stretching before him. The sky was a beautiful clear blue. Radio blasting, he drummed on the dashboard to the beat of the music, trying to ignore the many tasks he could, and perhaps should, be attending to at the office. He wondered what he would do when he arrived early.

  He got off I-81 near Harrisonburg. Almost at once he encountered the billboard: not digital, but an old-style, ink-and-paper signboard, sun-faded.

  The sky, the Tower,

  We lust for power.

  The Flood, the Burn,

  We never learn.

  Reset.

  Repent.

  The Burn was not bad—poetically speaking—for the Crudetastrophe. Marcus could not come up with a biblical-sounding term for powersat, either. We never learn rang all too true, although his take on the lessons to be learned and the poet’s clearly differed.

  U.S. 33-W narrowed to two lanes, soon ran out of embedded sensors for autodrive, and lost its shoulders to narrow some more. Sturdy trees crowded right up to the pavement. He slowed way down, and his fretting changed to showing up late. The “towns” along the “highway” became smaller and smaller, and the houses scattered between towns ever shabbier.

  Until there were no towns. He guessed he had missed the West Virginia border. By then he was well into the Appalachians, deep within the George Washington National Forest. Negotiating switchbacks. Up and down steep grades, many of them miles long. As were—whenever gaps opened among the trees—the luxuriant wooded vistas. Stunning. Fantastic.

  The Blue Ridge? By comparison (at least where he had crested it), that was a speed bump.

  And despite Marcus’s best intentions, he thought: Lindsey would have loved this drive.

  * * *

  For a long time, he and Lindsey had been great together.

  Almost always they had fun. Even when they didn’t, when the world made one of them sputter, the other would find the silver lining, or the amusing absurdity of it all, or a way to put matters into perspective. They both liked scenic drives and country inns. They liked hiking and canoeing, classical music and experimenting with exotic cuisines. Together, they learned how to scuba. They mocked the same bad movies.

  More than anything, she always knew the right thing to say.

  “I know your brother is a slacker,” she had once said, driving home from a miserable dinner out with his parents.

  Had Marcus not already loved Lindsey, those few words would have done the trick.

  It was nothing against Sean. His older brother was who he was. Sliding through life on charm and modest ambitions somehow worked for him.

  But growing up, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” had suited Marcus about as well as, “Why can’t you be more like your brother?”

  As a kid, Marcus could never understand why their parents tolerated Sean’s mediocre grades and goofing off. The folks did not much like their jobs, but they were far from lazy. Dad was a lawyer and the Washington lobbyist for a national association of rural electrical utilities. Mom was a Realtor and had an MBA. Not until well into high school had Marcus seen the bigger picture. Wheedling legislative favors, unloading money pits onto unsuspecting buyers, and coasting through school had something in common. All were ways to game the system. And that apparently, was what impressed his parents.

  Marcus could never bring himself to see things their way. He wanted to learn, not just make good grades. To make a difference, not a living. To change the world, not game it.

  Sean put in four years in general studies at a party college. He went on to become the one-man HR department at a small company—gloating, to parental approval, that the position lacked quantifiable responsibilities.

  Marcus earned a math degree at the University of Virginia and a master’s degree in systems engineering from MIT. He went on to do contract work at NASA where, with luck and i
f he did things right, maybe he could change more than one world.

  What he could not change was his parents’ attitude. Their only feedback on Marcus’s choices was that he worked too hard, that he let Space Systems Science and NASA take advantage of him. Sean said the same, only more bluntly: “You’re a sucker, bro.”

  But Lindsey got him. He thought he got her.

  Ready to move in together, the big question had been: where? His apartment was in Greenbelt, Maryland, near Goddard. Hers was in the City of Fairfax, Virginia, near the insurance company where she worked (and not far, as it happened, from the house where he had grown up). Neither apartment was big enough for two, not unless at least one of them shed a lot of possessions. Nowhere in the middle appealed to either of them.

  He suggested they find a place near her work, and she countered with moving near his. She was so solicitous about what his commute might become, so sympathetic, that it drove him to insist on northern Virginia. Together they found the town house in Reston, a beautiful place with a private dock on Lake Anne. He bought a canoe. It was going to be her moving-in present.

  Reston would mean an easy twenty-minute commute for Lindsey, and he was thrilled for her. “To return the favor,” she insisted that he buy the town house solo. The equity growth would all be his—the slow, grinding decline in house prices had to end someday—and she would spare him the complications of entwining their finances. Though he did not follow her logic—there was no hurry, but marriage was the obvious next step—he went along. That Marcus should own the place was obviously important to her.

  Because for Lindsey, moving in together had become Plan B. Because she was in the running to open and manage a new regional office, in Seattle. She kept that possibility to herself until, two days after closing on the town house, her promotion came through. By the end of that week she was off to the Left Coast, for the opportunity she “couldn’t not take.”

  You understand, Marcus. Right? And you own a house now, so be glad.

  It hadn’t helped Marcus’s newfound cynicism that Lindsey’s manipulations impressed Sean. As in, “You’re a sucker, bro.”

  * * *

  West Virginia Route 28, when Marcus finally came to it, was as isolated and unused as the crumbling road that had preceded it. For no discernible reason the national forest he had yet to leave had changed names from George Washington to Monongahela.

  He knew he was close when radio reception went to hell. Guessing what he would find, he checked his cell: no service. So he must have zipped past a second road sign unawares: announcement of the National Radio Quiet Zone.

  GPS satellites paid no heed to a terrestrial ban on transmission, though, and his nav system worked fine. He spotted the modest sign for the National Radio Astronomy Observatory where he expected, just before the unincorporated town of Green Bank.

  A few low buildings clustered near the observatory entrance. Passing the Science Center, the two cars and one yellow school bus in its parking lot seemed forlorn. He parked outside the L-shaped building Valerie Clayburn’s acknowledging text message had indicated.

  He was a half hour early.

  Bright white dish antennas, one after another, receded into the distance. None stood close enough to offer any sense of scale. So how big were they? Rather than kill time at the Science Center among grade schoolers, why not find out? He could not have asked for a nicer day for a stroll.

  His first stop: the trio of signposts abutting the parking lot. Ambling over, curious, Marcus found placards for the sun, Mercury, and Venus. Earth had a sign not far away. Touring the scale model of the solar system would take him out to the big antennas. He walked to Mars, only a few steps from Earth.

  Past Mars he came to a tollgatelike barrier across the road. Boldly lettered signs announced DIESELS ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT and TURN OFF YOUR DIGITAL CAMERAS. A well-trodden footpath circumvented the gate and he kept going. By the time he spotted the Jupiter sign, the first big antenna had caught his interest. It had a descriptive sign, too. The dish was forty-five feet across! How big were the antennas in the distance?

  Marcus understood the scale of the solar system—intellectually. Hiking it, even at a 1:3,000,000,000 scale, was something else again. Pluto and the last of the big dishes were still more than a mile away. He turned around without ever seeing the sign for Uranus.

  * * *

  Valerie’s office in the Jansky Lab overlooked the parking lot, and she glanced out her window whenever she heard a car. First-time visitors tended to arrive very early or very late. No one’s intuition about the drive was any good until they had made the trip once. Twice cars came, and both times technicians she knew got out. A third car brought one of her grad students.

  Rapt in her work she must have missed a car, because the next time she checked outside a man wearing a suit and tie was striding toward the building. Looking down from the second floor, she could not see his face, but it had to be Judson. No one but govvies dressed so formally, and then only on a first visit.

  Scientists dressed casually. Today she wore jeans, a random T-shirt, and a plaid flannel overshirt. When the Nobel Committee called, she would shop for a dress. Maybe.

  Shutting her office door behind her, Valerie bounded down the stairs. The man with the charcoal suit was in reception, signing for a visitor badge. “Marcus?” she called out.

  The man turned, and she recognized the face from last week’s conversation. Judson, all right.

  He had clear blue eyes, wavy black hair (at the moment wind-stirred) gone gray at the temples, a strong jaw, and, despite the early hour, hints of a five o’clock shadow. A bit guarded in his expression, perhaps, but fair enough: she had been less than forthcoming. Forty or so, she estimated. Not Hollywood handsome, but handsome enough. Not that that mattered. He was about six two and broad shouldered. Maybe a few pounds over his ideal weight, but he carried it well. Other than overdressed, he seemed, all in all, like an everyday sort of guy.

  “I’m Marcus,” he agreed, extending his hand. “Hello, Valerie.”

  “Thanks for coming.” She hesitated. This was a person in front of her, not some bureaucratic abstraction.

  But neither were powersats abstractions.

  “Valerie?” he prompted.

  “Right.” She took his hand, casting off her doubts. “Welcome to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, NRAO. We’ll start with a tour. The things we need to discuss will make more sense with some background.”

  “What else have you planned?”

  “The weekly technical lunch discussion among the professional staff, always fascinating, and we’ll wrap up with a quiet conversation in my office.” A long and pointed conversation.

  “Okay. Lead on.”

  Following her outside, he seemed surprised at her beat-up old Volkswagen Jetta.

  “Because it’s a diesel model,” she explained. “We only take bikes and diesels near the dishes. Anything else would mean RF from spark plugs or electric motors. And the older the car, the better. New cars have electrical everything, from locks to clocks to seat positioners. Makes them noisy.”

  “The instruments are that sensitive?”

  Wait till you see the dishes up close, she thought. A short drive brought them to the internal gate. She got out of the car to swipe her ID badge through the reader. Just past the gate, she pulled onto the shoulder. “That’s one of our smaller telescopes. Forty-five feet across.”

  “I know. I walked around for a bit.”

  “How far did you get?”

  “Half past Saturn before I turned around. Any farther and I would have been late.”

  She pulled the Jetta onto the shoulder near each telescope to share some of its background. Near one dish, bikes leaned against a trailer: the mark of grad students at work. She took Marcus inside the cramped maintenance trailer for a peek at the equipment—and at the quarter-inch steel walls shielding the dish from the electronics.

  Back in her car, as she started to describe the first eigh
ty-five footer, the Science Center’s white diesel tour bus lumbered past. “This is part of a three-telescope interferometer. An interferometer—”

  “Synthesizes data from multiple instruments into one image. The composite has the resolution of an instrument the size of the separation between instruments. Same principle as synthetic aperture radar.” He grinned. “I’m an engineer, and I come prepared.”

  Valerie knew the former. She had hoped for the latter—and that he would be open-minded. Only then did it occur to her to ask how open-minded she was.

  It was not the time to second-guess herself. And anyway, he would get much the same message from many of the staff. All the more important that she get him to lunch on time.…

  “Let’s skip to the main event,” she said. Because the big dish will knock your socks off.

  When she next parked, Marcus, his eyes round, rushed from the car. Everyone did. She gave him time to take it all in: the world’s largest birdbath, atop an intricate lattice pyramid, above a round trolley base with sixteen enormous wheels. In addition to a stand-alone trailer, a built-in shielded room high above the ground held many of the onsite controls. The instrument arm, jutting out from and over the dish, made the telescope that much more impressive.

  “The Green Bank Telescope,” she began, pointing up at the enormous paraboloid dish. “Completed in 2000, the GBT replaced the smaller big telescope that collapsed under its own weight from metal fatigue in 1988. The dish’s signal-collecting surface measures one hundred meters by one hundred ten meters—longer in both dimensions than a football field. Only that’s not a surface, but two thousand and four small aluminum surfaces. Automation tilts and warps each panel in real time as the structure moves, to compensate for sagging, thermal gradients, and wind.”

  “Damn, that’s big. What happens if lightning strikes?”

  “It happens about four times a year, without incident. The GBT weighs more than sixteen million pounds, about the same as nineteen loaded and fueled jumbo jets. When lightning does strike, that’s a lot of metal, with all its metal wheels firmly pressed against the well-grounded steel track. The track is lots of metal, too: a circle sixty-four meters in diameter.”