As he arrived that morning, he had felt as if he were going into one of those Dr. Strangelove bunkers that he used to see on television as a child; it made him wonder just how paranoid he really was.
The young researcher sitting next to him was, according to his nametag, David Tolemy. Richard found his gaze going to that nametag over and over again. He'd heard the researcher's name mentioned several times in the last twenty-four hours, but somehow he'd always expected the spelling to mimic the Pharaoh's—Ptolemy.
The researcher looked nothing like a pharaoh. He looked like a barely thirty-something man who spent most of his time behind dozens of sets of locked doors, staring through layers of equipment that led him to space. Tolemy had a special cart next to his equipment. It contained both a small refrigerator and a tiny gourmet coffee maker (although Richard's generation was the only one that called that stuff “gourmet” anymore; most people simply called the variety of drinks with cocoa beans in them “coffee").
As Tolemy's fingers fluttered over his flat-screen control panel, one hand would slip to the cart, grab a large soda/iced coffee container, and sip from the straw. It was an obsessive, unconscious maneuver, that Richard had seen a lot from his indoor techs.
He both hated it and felt powerless to do anything constructive about it. He hired the best minds of all generations, and if he'd learned anything in his decades of running the most creative corporations in the country, it was that the best minds came with more baggage than he'd ever thought possible.
When he'd mentioned it to his closest advisor after a visit to the Gates wing in Seattle, she'd laughed. You have baggage, she said. Isn't that why you never married?
He'd never married because he didn't have time for small talk, and he didn't feel right vetting women just to see if they were interested in his money. He had no desire to have children. His legacy, he knew, was these corporations and all the discoveries he'd made on his way to fulfilling his childhood dream.
He pulled the chair closer to Tolemy's wide screen, careful to stay away from the cart.
"I was warned not to waste your time,” Tolemy was saying, “but I want to lay the foundation. Stop me if you know this."
He launched into a verbal dissertation about evac points and speed, about trajectories and distances in space. Richard knew this; he was the one who'd designed the program after all, but he listened just the same. He wanted to hear how Tolemy had come to his current conclusions.
After twenty-five minutes of illustrated monologue, what Richard learned was this: Tolemy guessed that the astronauts took the last possible evac point. Their ship's oxygen was gone; they only had their suits left. Maybe they had put on the suits, and then realized they wouldn't even be able to see each other's faces as they waited for sleep to overtake them.
That last was Richard's fanciful addition. He'd been in the old suits; Tolemy hadn't. He knew how isolating they felt. Isolating and cramped.
"Add to that being inside a tiny capsule,” Tolemy said, “with the windows already clouding, and who can blame them for leaving?"
Who could, besides Richard? And he knew that his blame was simply self-interest—the unwillingness of an obsessed man to lose his original vision, long after it had truly disappeared.
Unlike the other researchers, Tolemy hadn't tried to prove who evacked first. Borman to show it could be done? Or Anders because he was the junior member of the team? Had Lovell gone first because he was more of a cowboy than the rest?
The original researchers had contended that it mattered, that mass, height, and the strength with which the astronaut pushed off determined where the others ended up.
Tolemy claimed that none of that mattered; that they were all weak and dying and that they would have pushed away with little or no strength.
"I figured that the first one would be the easiest to find, and that's what I concentrated on,” he said.
He had planned to take the last possible evac point and work backward, after exploring each area from top to bottom. He computed maximum speed and drift; he computed all the possible directions. He developed a region of space where he believed the first evacuee would be, and he searched, painstakingly, for two years.
"I found a lot of possibles,” Tolemy said, “but they didn't pan out."
He spoke of months as if they were moments. Richard leaned closer to the screen, feeling a respect for the young researcher that he hadn't felt before. Tolemy shared some of his obsession, whether he admitted it or not, or Tolemy wouldn't have sunk so much time into this, no matter how much he was being paid.
"Then I saw this one.” Tolemy used a pointer to touch a small mark on the side of the screen.
He amplified the image, but, even at full magnification, Richard couldn't see what Tolemy had. It looked no different than all the other small space debris Richard had looked at over the years, some of it in the early months of this very project.
"Why is this one special?” Richard asked.
"The reflection,” Tolemy said as if it were obvious. “Let me show you some time lapse."
He clicked on the image, then clicked on it again. It changed from a light mark against the blackness of space to a slightly brighter mark, but Richard really didn't see the difference.
"I guess I'm not trained well enough,” Richard said.
"Okay,” Tolemy said, lost in his own excitement. “Let me show you a few other things."
He opened up several more windows, all of them with astronauts building the space station that was completed in orbit at the end of the 1970s. He would click on one astronaut and then shrink the image. When he was done, the astronaut's image looked like the one in the upper corner of the screen.
What Richard wasn't sure of was whether if you took an image of a meteor and did the same thing would the meteor look like the tiny image in the corner too.
He said something to that effect—mumbled it, really, because he was concentrating and not paying attention to stroking the researcher's ego.
"Oh, no,” Tolemy said. “They're all different. There are components in those early space suits—particularly the plastic in the helmets—that aren't used any more, and they don't occur naturally that we know of. When light reflects off those, it's distinct."
Richard's expression must have showed his skepticism, because Tolemy grinned.
"My bosses asked the same thing before they called you and so I showed them this."
It was a light spectrum chart, showing how various materials reflected the sun's rays outside of the Earth's atmosphere. According to the chart, the plastic in the helmet, particularly on the visor, did have its own signature. And, somehow, young Tolemy had gotten a reading from the bits of light given off by the image in the upper corner of his screen.
"You have to understand,” he said as he explained all of this to Richard, “I worked this out over weeks of study."
"You have to understand,” Richard said. “If I take action based on your light spectrum analysis and your speculative equations, I'm going to spend millions of dollars, risk several lives, and take many months of time. You have to be sure of this."
Tolemy took his left hand off the console and pushed the cart away with his right. He turned slightly in his chair.
"I think you were the one who called this searching for a needle in a galaxy full of haystacks,” he said.
Richard nodded.
"Well, I found something small and thin and made of metal. You gonna check it out?"
Richard smiled. “When you put it that way,” he said, “I think I will."
* * * *
The trip toward the object that Richard now called the Needle took both more preparation than the trip to the capsule and less. More because, deep down, Richard had never expected to find the astronauts, so he hadn't done some of the basic imaginings he'd done for the capsule trip, and less because modern ships were so much more efficient than they had been eleven years ago.
For one thing, cargo runs from Earth to the Moon ba
se had become common. Trips out of the atmosphere were even more common, with wealthy and upper middle-class tourists opting to stay in orbiting hotels.
The Needle never even approached Earth orbit. He floated out there for fifty years, following a predetermined path of his own. At his closest point to Earth in exactly eight months and one day, he would still be a hundred times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.
Richard had ships that could easily go beyond the Earth/Moon run. One of his companies was on the forefront of Mars development. NASA had bought several of his deep space ships (not an accurate name, Richard knew, but NASA liked the sound of it) for their first manned Mars missions, and several other companies had bought more of those ships to scout Mars locations for another base.
Richard had stayed out of most of that planning. He didn't really care about Mars. His interest was still in the needles and the haystacks and space itself, not in colonizing the solar system. He figured someone else could take care of that, and until his meeting with Tolemy at ACP-S, he had let them.
After that meeting, he'd seen his mistake. The ships his companies had designed were for transport—humans, cargo, materiel—not for maneuvering or quick travel. To get to the Needle and match its orbit, he'd either have to design his own kind of ship or buy one from one of his far-sighted competitors.
And he only had eight months.
So he bought several of his competitors’ ships—something that took more middlemen than he had thought it would. His competitors thought he was trying to steal proprietary information or at least copy proprietary technology, and while that might be a side benefit of this trip, it certainly wasn't Richard's intention.
Instead, he tried to make the ships as Richard-friendly as possible.
Deep Space Darts, as these ships were called, were designed for long travel at great speeds. All engines and fuel, little interior room. The ships’ accommodations were cut down too much for his tastes. Richard examined half a dozen from various international companies, and worried about how travel would feel—cramped and narrow and uncomfortable, not something he wanted to experience, even though he was an in-shape fifty-eight. He needed some kind of cargo area with a separate environmental system, and a good cabin.
In the end, he bought one of his competitors’ largest darts and gave his own team two months to retrofit it. He made certain the ship was supplied with the right equipment—a state-of-the art grappler (complete with multiple hand sizes), automatic lifeboat technology, and an up-to-date medical unit. The dart had the cargo bay he needed, but not a large captain's cabin. Nor did it have a relaxation area for the crew.
Richard wasn't bringing a large team this time—just himself and a few astronauts to help him wrestle the Needle from space. He also brought a biologist and a forensic anthropologist with an interest in space. If he got the body, most of the tests would be conducted on Earth in one of his labs—no need to do the work in cramped conditions—but he'd be able to report a few breakthroughs while still in space.
No live feed this time. There was too big a chance for error. He didn't want to pull up beside the Needle only to discover that it was a bit of mislabeled space debris.
That's what he worried about most: discovering nothing. Some early ACP-S missions led him directly to space debris and, fortunately, he hadn't recorded those either. He hadn't been on a trip for an ACP-S identified project in eight years, and he worried about this one. He had other scientists double-check Tolemy's information, but they kept coming up with the same result:
They couldn't verify that it was a Needle. They couldn't guarantee anything.
In the end, he had to trust his own response. Tolemy's information was the first in almost a decade to convince him.
He wanted to give this one a chance.
* * * *
On the ride out, he spent most of his time doing simulations with the grappler. He wouldn't run the grappler to bring the body in, if indeed what they'd found was a body. But he was going to help the team this time. He couldn't stay away.
His closest advisors had insisted that a single, multimedia reporter with impeccable credentials be included on the flight. If the dart didn't find a Needle, the reporter would write everything up as an experimental trip. She wouldn't know the real mission until it was achieved—if it was achieved.
She came along only with the agreement that she could talk with Richard on the way back. He would give her unlimited, exclusive access.
Any good reporter would jump at that, and one did. Helen Dail, a woman who had three Pulitzers for journalism, spent most of her time interviewing the crew. She also explored the dart—what little of it she had access to—and lived up to her part of the agreement by not interviewing the astronauts, science team, or Richard.
He could see her storing up questions, though. She was old enough—maybe forty—to make sure she had a paper back-up, but she was also heavily wired. She had digital cameras and PDAs and more notebooks than he'd thought possible. She had met her weight limit for the dart not with clothes or personal items, but with equipment.
She made him nervous. She was good enough to figure out what he was after, even if he never found it, even if no one ever told her what the mission was.
He stayed out of her way as much as he could.
Ten days past the Moon, the dart had reached its target destination. The little ship wasn't equipped with many cameras or long-distance scanning equipment (not that any of it was yet at the level Richard wanted it to be). They were close enough to confirm that something was in the position that Tolemy had predicted, but not close enough to confirm that something was (or had been) human.
"Let's get close,” Richard said to the pilot. He was in the cockpit along with the pilot and co-pilot. The science team was in the cargo bay, and the astronauts were suiting up. He would wait to suit up until the last minute.
He didn't want Helen Dail to know he cared enough about whatever this was to suit up.
Over the next long half hour, the pilot took the dart into camera range. The item appeared on the screen, large and whitish gray. It tumbled—a slow spin that seemed like something it had done for a long, long time.
It was long and slender, and could very well have been a human astronaut. But Richard couldn't see a helmet, nothing obvious that told him what they had.
Richard manipulated the external cameras himself, trying to catch all sides of the object.
Finally he saw what he needed—a glint of sunlight off a thick plastic visor.
His breath caught.
"Well?” the pilot asked. “Should we scrub?"
"No,” Richard said. “We have a go."
He hurried out of the cockpit, careful to close the door behind himself, wanting to keep Dail out. Then he hurried to the cargo bay where the astronauts waited. They were watching the same image playing over and over again.
"Shouldn't be hard,” Mac McFerson said as he watched. “One of our simpler maneuvers, actually."
Richard slid into his space suit, his hands shaking.
"So long as we don't grab the thing too tight,” said Greg Yovel. “Don't want to damage it."
"Maybe we should tether, do a walk, and guide it in,” McFerson said. He was a bit of a cowboy, which was why Richard wanted him along.
Richard turned, helmet in hand, and looked at the slowly spinning Needle. Who are you? he wondered. Anders? Borman? Lovell?
His heart was pounding. “Let's just bring it in as we planned and hope for the best."
McFerson made a small disapproving noise in the back of his throat.
They'd follow the procedures Richard had established with the capsule—keeping the bay cold once the body was inside, making sure that nothing in the process damaged the body outside of what had already occurred in space.
"Greg,” Richard said, “you run the grappler."
"You and I will handle the door,” he said to McFerson. “Magnetize."
Everyone pressed a button near the wrists o
f their suits to magnetize their boots. He felt a sharp tug on the bottom of his feet, tried to lift one, and felt the magnetic pull.
"It's a go,” he said to the pilot.
The dart vented atmosphere from the cargo bay—away from the Needle, so as not to push him off course.
Greg slipped his hands into the net that ran the grappler, his body tense. Richard stood behind him, watching the imagery on the screen.
First, Greg had to stop the Needle from spinning. Then he had to wrap the grappler's long fingers around the center of the Needle and slowly bring it toward the bay doors.
Once the Needle was close, the doors would open and Richard, along with McFerson, would grab the Needle and bring it inside.
The first part went according to plan. Greg managed to slow the spin—not stop it entirely, but bank it enough so that the Needle wouldn't turn hard and damage itself against the grappler's fingers.
Then he grabbed the Needle around what should have been its waist.
"It feels like this thing is going to slip,” he muttered, the words coming through everyone's helmets. Rachel Saunders, the forensic anthropologist, walked toward the screen, but the other scientist pulled her back.
Richard wanted to go there too—he wanted to slide his hands into the gloves that operated the grappler from a distance—but he knew he couldn't compensate for any errors.
The Needle—if indeed that's what it was—did look slippery and unstable. The slipperiness came from its absolute rigidity; the unstable part from its tiny size. Richard had never seen anything so small in the grappler before.
Greg leaned into the gloves, his body as rigid as the Needle's. Richard could feel the fear coming off him in waves.
"Positions,” McFerson said.
Richard jumped. He had forgotten to give that order. Rachel and the other scientist moved to the edge of the bay, grabbing onto the handles just in case. Richard took his spot near the door, holding a handle as well. It felt cold through his thick glove, but he knew that was just his imagination; he couldn't really feel anything except the sweat on his palms.
"Open the door,” Greg said, his voice taut.
Asimov's SF, February 2007 Page 17