“You know, a meat diet consumes far more energy and generates more carbon emissions than eating vegetarian.”
Uh-huh. And how much energy will it take to hoist your bony vegetarian butt and a week or two’s supply of (shudder) tofu to The Space Place?
At least Dillon had left methane—cow farts—out of the discussion.
Marcus finished chewing, then returned to training. “What have you done here so far?”
“My med tests. FAA disclaimers and safety lectures. Got fitted for my counterpressure suit. A couple rounds up against the toilet trainer.”
“Ah, the toilet trainer,” Marcus sympathized. Step one on the instruction placard read, ACTIVATE CAMERA.
Going to space meant learning to shit while jammed, positioned just so, against a four-inch toilet opening. Peeing down a funnel into a vacuum hose was the easy part. Male docking not recommended …
“Good times,” Dillon agreed, grinning. “But wait, there’s more. The centrifuge. Flew the hopper”—barebones utility craft—“simulator, while some snag with my scuba certification got straightened out. Once it finally did, mostly I’ve been in the NBT.”
Marcus had spent time in the neutral buoyancy tank, too. The tank was the world’s largest and deepest swimming pool. It contained life-sized mock-ups of Phoebe base and several other key Phoebe structures, The Space Place, and a representative expanse of PS-1.
Neutrally buoyant objects, however massive, could be moved about in the NBT as though weightless. In a pressure suit, wearing weights to neutralize the trainee’s own residual buoyancy, the NBT was the only way to mimic aspects of space conditions for longer than the half-minute at a pop that the Vomit Comet achieved. Real astronauts rehearsed in-space construction projects for days in the NBT before trying them out for real.
None of which made the NBT a good zero-gee training simulation. Try to move anything quickly in the tank and the water’s drag—hardly a factor in space—interfered. The objects with which one practiced seemed weightless, but the swimmer himself did not. And the scuba divers all around, loitering lest some trainee got into trouble, shattered the illusion of being in space.
“I haven’t seen The Space Place mock-up,” Marcus said. There were not enough hours in the day, even if NASA would have paid his way to use that end of the tank.
“Nor I, beyond the preflight requirement.” Dillon rubbed his chin. “I can see that once I’m up there. I figured, why not spend my time in the tank mock-visiting places I can’t visit.”
For someone who vacationed in space, extra NBT time probably cost only loose change from beneath the sofa cushions. It must be nice to be rich. Unless—
“One of the men here earlier called you boss. Do you do business on orbit?”
“We work together. I own an investment firm and The Space Place outing is last year’s bonus.”
“Business must be good.”
“You have no idea.” The words came across closer to a dirge than agreement.
Real astronauts, and Marcus knew a few, were far less serious. The old adage was evidently correct: The rich were different. Oh, well, he would have a zillionaire anecdote with which to regale Val.
“Done your freefall flight training yet?” Marcus asked.
“Tomorrow’s my first flight.” Dillon looked at his tray, the food picked over, and slid it away. “It’s never too soon to stop eating.”
“Today was my second time, much more successful than the first, so I’ll offer you some free advice. Eat something in the morning, just nothing heavy or greasy. A dry bagel, say, or some cold cereal.”
“Thanks.” Dillon stood abruptly, shoving back his chair. “I’ve got work to do. If you’ll excuse me?”
“Sure. Have a good evening.” As his new acquaintance stalked off, Marcus guessed the man did not know how.
* * *
With a stack of hard-copy program listings under one arm, Patrick followed Valerie down Jansky Lab’s second-floor hallway. She paused outside the observatory’s main control room to tap at a wall-mounted keypad.
He had never been trusted with the access code. As a point of pride, he had observed closely enough, often enough, to know the code. As a point of honor, he had never used it.
With a soft squeak, the door opened.
“Hey, Ian,” she called to the man on duty.
Ian Wakefield glanced up. He was chewing on the stem of an old briar pipe he had never been seen to smoke. Eight computer displays sat on the curved console that he had to himself. “Hi, guys. Shut the door.”
Patrick looked for a clear spot to set the printouts.
All around, holos flickered and LEDs glowed. A row of electronics cabinets stood in the middle of the floor. More cabinets filled an interior nook, behind a glass partition. All that gear—supercomputers, signal processors, amplifiers, and an atomic clock—spewed RF that could bollix observations. Even the humble keyboard on which Ian pounded away emitted low-level RF as its innards ceaselessly scanned to detect keystrokes.
Unseen copper screening—behind painted wallboard, beneath well-worn carpet, and above the acoustic ceiling tiles—encased the room. Conductive glass in the windows completed the enclosure. Many a physics lab was a Faraday cage: a room whose metal sheath kept ambient radiation outside. The GBT control room was an inside-out Faraday cage, trapping radiation; this cage kept the emissions from all this electronic gear from reaching the exquisitely sensitive receivers of the big scopes.
“The door,” Ian repeated.
Patrick set his printout stack on the floor and pulled the door shut. “Where do you want us to set up?” he asked Ian.
Ian gestured vaguely. “What are you two up to?”
“ASTRID upgrade,” Valerie said. “We’ve got time reserved for testing on the forty-five-foot dish.”
Ian called up the day’s observation schedule. “Right, so you are. Okay, to install software you’ll need sysadmin privileges. Valerie, I’ll log you into workstation six.”
There an emphasis on you, and a sidelong glance that Patrick ignored.
“It’s a slick upgrade,” Valerie said, talking fast. She blithered when uncomfortable, and slights like Ian’s made her uncomfortable. “The dishes are always oversubscribed…”
Patrick wasn’t uncomfortable, only sad. Misplace a billion-dollar spacecraft just once, and years later people still don’t trust you. He arranged printed-out test cases on the console ledge as Valerie rattled on about the sky survey one of her grad students was doing, and that a dish slewing between approved observations could be observing while it moved.
The astronomer’s integrated desktop, the observation-planning software more commonly known as ASTRID, did not plan between sessions. Yet. Patrick had helped Valerie code an upgrade to change that. The new code would take pending requests into account when planning how to redirect a dish. Rather than take the simplest path—rotate this far; tip that much—the upgraded software would optimize dish movement to seek out objects of interest along the way as it moved. The new software not only read the look-when-you-can list, it updated the list as it went. Suppose a scope were to look repeatedly at sky objects A and B. With the new software the dish would trace a different route, gathering different data along the way, each time. Yet another new feature reprioritized based on the real-time weather, because rain and snow blocked some wavelengths.
“Pretty cool,” Ian conceded, gesturing outside at the heavy rain. “I could have used that last upgrade today. Okay. Test away.”
“Thanks.” She plugged a thumb drive into her assigned workstation.
“What do your hear from Marcus?” Patrick asked. He didn’t care beyond calming down Valerie.
“His second Vomit Comet ride. He didn’t throw up today,” she said lightly.
Too lightly. Marcus’s upcoming spaceflight plainly terrified her.
“Any day you don’t throw up is a good day,” Patrick said. “And what’s Simon up to?”
“He’s sleeping over at a
friend’s tonight.” After a flurry of typing, she turned. “Okay, the software is installed in a test partition. Test sequence one, please.”
As testing proceeded, Ian glanced over his shoulder every so often to give Patrick the fish eye. With traces of pity rather than distrust, Valerie checked on Patrick, too. Because, obviously, the new software also meant many more opportunities to hunt for the Verne probe.
Knowing Valerie meant well, Patrick pretended not to notice.
Tuesday, September 19
From within the claustrophobic confines of the spaceport mantrap, Dillon watched TSA screeners poke and prod his carry-ons. How interesting could shoes, a datasheet, and a bottle of aspirin be?
He imagined the various sensors at work, sniffing for explosives and scanning for metal. Beyond the already intrusive airport-type screening, he also got X-rayed. He might have had a bomb up his ass, and no one bound for space could credibly object to a few millirems on the ground “for everyone’s safety.”
The mantrap door slid open and the overhead speaker came on. “You may now leave the security station and reclaim your belongings. Have a safe flight.”
As Dillon slipped on his shoes and tucked his few carry-on items into flight-suit pockets, Jonas Walker exited the mantrap. Jonas was senior among the three “employees” Dillon had been ordered to deliver to The Space Place. The others, Lincoln Roberts and Felipe Torres, had already cleared the security checkpoint and exited to the tarmac.
“Shall we, boss?” Jonas said. Only however deferentially he spoke, it was not a question. He gave the orders now, he did not take them, and it had been no accident that he, not Dillon, was the last of the four to pass through security.
Jonas was soft-spoken and poised, almost petite, yet with a creepy physical intensity: James Bond turned welterweight wrestler. He knew more about software than any five other people Dillon knew. Ditto Lincoln in electrical engineering and Felipe in communications systems. Tweedlesmart, Tweedlesmarter, and Tweedle-Effing-Genius. In simpler times, Dillon had been happy to have Yakov’s experts at his company.
More naïve times.
“Are you ready?” Jonas prompted, this time with an edge to his voice.
“Sure.” Dillon grabbed his bag. He wondered what hold Yakov had over Jonas and the others, but they no more responded to Dillon’s subtle probing than he to theirs.
Maybe we’re all trapped.
“After you, boss.”
At the terminal door, held open by a smiling member of the ground crew, they were offered sunglasses. They walked out into a gorgeous late-summer day. Heat devils shimmered and shimmied over the tarmac.
One of the huge mother ships officially dubbed The Space Portal—and known to everyone as Big Momma—sat straight ahead, its white paint gleaming in the sun. Mother ship one or two? Dillon wondered inanely. And which of Cosmic Adventure’s three shuttles?
As though he did not have enough to think about.
Beneath a hundred-fifty-foot wingspan, Big Momma appeared to have three fuselages, but only two were part of the plane. The central segment was the shuttle on which they would ride to orbit. Near the mother ship’s cruising ceiling, the shuttle would drop free and light its rocket.
Dillon and Jonas started walking.
The shuttle was a fat dart studded with windows for the passengers. From the angle at which he approached, Dillon could not see the rocket nozzle. The entire back half of the shuttle was covered in frost condensed from the air by the frigid liquid-hydrogen and liquid-oxygen tanks. The rime weighed less than sufficient insulation to have kept the ice from forming.
Dillon first, they strode up the shallow ramp into the shuttle. A man and woman stood waiting inside, with big starburst logos emblazoned on their yellow flight suits. Pilot and copilot. Dillon did not know, or care, who was which.
“Welcome to Cosmic Adventures,” the man said. He had a scruffy mustache and a crooked smile. “It’s a great day to fly.”
The shuttle accommodated six passengers, with three seats on a side, and the flight was going to be full. Lincoln and Felipe had taken the back row. Dillon thought he recognized the women, both raven-haired beauties, from space training. They sat in the middle seats, leaning into the aisle, speaking Spanish. He and Jonas took the remaining seats, in the front row.
Dillon immediately began fastening and tightening restraints: a lap belt and two shoulder harnesses. He would be damned if whoever came to check on the passengers would find anything to adjust on him.
Because the belts were something he could still control.
Mustache Man checked everyone’s seat belts and double-checked the hatch seal before disappearing into the cockpit. The lock in the metal cockpit door engaged with a clunk.
“This is Captain Blackwell,” a woman’s voice announced. She had a touch of Southern accent. “Prepare for departure. Our ride is cleared for takeoff.”
Dillon looked out his window. Though Big Momma blocked much of his view, he saw they were already, ever so slowly, creeping away from the terminal.
They trundled down the runway, the start of the trip to orbit eerily mundane. Using almost the entire long runway, the heavily laden plane more lurched than leapt into the air.
With the plane’s top speed of only two hundred knots, Dillon had expected this phase of the “launch” would drag. Instead, as the ground receded beneath them—the Florida coast lush with life, the Atlantic waters a rich blue-green—he willed time to stop. A lump formed in his throat. So much beauty.
Too soon, Big Momma began leveling off and the next announcement came. “Approaching sixty thousand feet. Prepare for release and launch. Release in five. Four…”
At zero, Dillon’s stomach fell out.
Faster than he could process we’ve dropped the shuttle’s rocket roared to life. An elephant sat on him and crushed him into his seat. His cheeks sagged toward his spine. His eyeballs pressed into his head.
The shuttle tipped into a steep climb. “Ignition,” the pilot reported, unnecessarily.
It was not a whole elephant, not even close. Max acceleration would be only three gees and Dillon had taken four gees on the training centrifuge without breaking into a sweat. But with the ship’s growl and shudder, as the ground withdrew and the sky grew darker by the moment, it seemed different.
“Whee!” the woman behind Dillon half cheered, half grunted.
“Next stop, The Space Place,” the pilot announced. “Is everyone comfy back there?”
Not even close, Dillon thought. But the gnawing in his gut had nothing to do with the roar of the engines.
* * *
Thaddeus Stankiewicz watched his baby sister, grinning from ear to ear, sashay across a crowded living room. A dozen people must have waylaid her en route. “You clean up good,” Thad said as she finally got to the phone.
“Thanks!” She twirled once for the camera.
In fact, Robin was gorgeous and dressed to kill in a short, low-cut, black sheath. Her hair, long and golden, was swept up into a fancy hairdo to which he could not put a name. He thought the dangly diamond earrings were new. Men in tuxes and women in cocktail dresses milled and murmured in the background.
“It’s about time,” she said. “I thought you’d forgotten.”
“Never. And I hope you know I’d be there if I could. I wish I lived closer.” I wish we lived on the same world. “In my defense, it’s still early afternoon, Phoebe time.”
“Well, it’s almost eight in Stockholm. When will you deign to come down to—”
Twin girls, so like Robin at the same age, in matching pink party dresses, crowded the camera. “It’s Uncle Thaddeus,” one shrieked. Deborah, he thought. She was always just a bit taller.
“Hello, Uncle Thaddeus,” the girls chanted in unison.
“Hi, girls,” he said. “You both look very pretty. Are you taking good care of your mother on her birthday?”
“Uh-huh,” Deborah said. Cynthia only nodded vigorously.
“My lit
tle darlings have been on their best behavior.” Robin put an arm around each girl. “When will their favorite uncle grace us with a visit?”
“Soon,” Thad lied. Beneath the camera’s line of sight, he rapped the shelf of the comm console. He glanced over his shoulder at the locked door of his tiny room. “Sorry, kiddo. Duty calls. Enjoy your party.” He leaned closer to the camera. “Bye, girls.”
“Bye, Uncle Thad—”
He broke the connection before he lost self-control. “Take care, kiddo,” he told the final, frozen frame.
For weeks after … the incident, Thad had awakened every day, when he slept at all, expecting, and dreading, to be called upon again. To get new orders. As much as he wanted to leave—to flee—the scene of the crime, he had not dared. But the call never came and he had learned, once more, to sleep.
He had dared to hope, as the months passed, that new orders would never come. That he was done. That he was out. That he could carry his shame and guilt with him to the grave. That Robin would never know what he had had to do to protect her.
When two years passed without contact, he had dared to apply for a job Earthside—and an anonymous e-mail advised that his assignment was not complete. Every day since, he had awakened wondering if today was the day.
Thirty minutes earlier, the long-dreaded message had come at last. The innocent-seeming words had etched themselves into his brain. Something compelled him to reread the text anyway.
A great birthday party, cousin—too bad you aren’t here. I wanted you to have some reminders of what’s important. Enjoy. Jacob.
Cousin Jacob was imaginary. Yakov was all too real. And Thad’s master, these past long years.
Thad tapped the text’s first attachment, a file named Birthday 2023. A holo opened: of Robin, beaming, wearing the cocktail dress he had just seen, her adoring husband at her side. She held out dangly diamond earrings, still in their little, black-velvet-lined case, for her guests to admire. The twins, in identical pink party frocks, grinning goonily for the camera, stood hand in hand in front of their parents.
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