The Calculating Stars

by Mary Robinette Kowal

  He was sunburnt, and had wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, as though he usually smiled a lot. Not today, though. Lines of strain turned his mouth down, and his hoary gray eyebrows were drawn together with concern.

  “Dr. York. Mrs. York.” He gestured to the man next to him, who was rotund and balding, but had a splendidly tailored suit. “This is M. Scherzinger from the United Nations. I’ve asked him to sit in on our conversation.”

  “Charmed.” He bent over my hand with a click of his heels, but his eyes strayed to the small scar my hairline.

  Or, at least, I thought they did. I might have been a little paranoid about my appearance. I had tried to find the line between professional and dowdy, but it likely didn’t matter. I was the only woman in the room.

  Another man, with red hair and no chin, approached and said, “Should we get started, Mr. President? We don’t want to waste Dr. York’s time.” By which he meant that the president was very busy.

  “Of course. Thank you, Mr. O’Neill.” President Brannan gestured to the front of the conference room.

  I kept my gaze fixed upon the chalkboards, scanning the numbers to see if everything had been transferred accurately. It was easier than thinking about the fact that we were about to give a presentation to the president. Or, at least, the acting president.

  Around us, the men took their seats and stared at the front of the room expectantly. My heart was racing, and my palms stuck to the portfolio with sweat. To look at me, you wouldn’t think that it was snowing outside.

  At least I was only there as backup, in case Nathaniel needed additional calculations to explain the situation. Give me an unpowered landing and I was fine. Addressing a roomful of people? Thank you, but no.

  At the moment, all I wanted to do was get through the afternoon without vomiting. Besides, there was a disturbing consistency to how data presented by pretty young women was treated. It was better all around if it was Nathaniel doing the talking.

  I set my portfolio down on a little table between the chalkboards. One of them was blank and there was plenty of chalk, in a variety of colors, waiting for me. I picked up a piece so I’d have something to do with my hands. The cool white cylinder soaked up the sweat from my skin.

  My husband faced the room and waited until he had everyone’s attention. “Gentlemen. In the weeks since the Meteor, we have been focused on recovery efforts. Hundreds of thousands of people in countries around the At lantic have been rendered homeless. In some places, the social order has collapsed, leading to rioting, looting, and other atrocities as people compete for scarce resources. My duty today is to tell you that this is not the worst of our problems.”

  Listening to the rolling, authoritative tone of his speech, it became much easier to remember why he had become something of a celebrity after we launched the satellites.

  “Many people fear that another meteor will strike. It’s a natural fear, and why we’re buried in this bunker. But … but the chances of another strike occurring are astronomically small. The danger represented by this equation is not only much greater, but certain.” He gave a rueful smile and shrugged. “For decades, scientists have wondered what happened to the dinosaurs. Why they all died off. This … this might explain it.”

  He walked to the chalkboard with my equations on it. “I won’t expect you to follow the math here, but I will say that it has been checked by top people in geology, climatology, and mathematics.”

  That last one was only me, but I didn’t interrupt him. Nathaniel paused and surveyed the room, gathering their attention. The golden light from the faux window brushed his cheeks, picking out the small scars. Under his dark gray suit, his bruises had faded, and he stood with easy confidence, as if he had never been injured.

  Taking a breath, Nathaniel tapped the board. “The problem is, gentlemen, that the Earth is going to get warmer. The dust that the Meteor kicked up will clear from our skies. The water vapor … that’s the problem. It will trap heat, which will cause evaporation, which will put more water vapor into the air, which will, in turn, make the Earth hotter, and kick off a vicious cycle that will eventually make the planet unfit for human habitation.”

  A plump, sallow man on the right side of the table snorted. “It’s snowing today in Los Angeles.”

  Nathaniel nodded and pointed to him. “Exactly. That snow is directly linked to the Meteor. The dust and smoke that got kicked into the atmosphere are going to cool the Earth for the next several years. We’ll probably lose crops this year, not just in the United States, but globally.”

  President Brannan, bless him, raised his hand before speaking. “How much will the temperature drop?”

  “Elma?” Nathaniel half-turned toward me.

  My stomach lurched into my throat, and I flipped through the papers in my portfolio to find the one I wanted. “Seventy to one hundred degrees globally.”

  Toward the back of the room, someone said, “Couldn’t hear.”

  Swallowing, I lifted my head from the papers and faced the room. This was no different from shouting over the engine of an airplane. “Seventy to one hundred degrees.”

  “That doesn’t seem possible.” The man at the back crossed his arms over his chest.

  “That’s just for the first few months.” They were focusing on the wrong thing. The temperature drop would be unpleasant, but was short-term. “Then we’ll have three to four years of a global climate that’s 2.2 degrees cooler than average, before the temperature begins to rise.”

  “2.2? Huh. So what’s the big tizzy over?”

  President Brannan said, “That’s more than enough to severely affect crops. Growing seasons will shorten by ten to thirty days, so we’ll have to convince farmers to plant different crops and at different times of year. That’s not going to be easy.”

  As the former secretary of agriculture, it wasn’t surprising that he intuitively understood the trouble with a change in climate. But he was still focused on the wrong thing. Yes, we had a mini–Ice Age to get through, but none of them were considering the eventual rise in temperature.

  “Farm subsidies.” Another man, maybe the one who’d said he couldn’t hear, leaned across the table. “It got farmers to change their crops during the Great Depression.”

  “All of our resources are going to be tied up in rebuilding.”

  As they argued, Nathaniel stepped back to me and murmured, “Will you chart the temperature rise?”

  I nodded and turned to the board, grateful to have something concrete to do. The chalk slid across the surface, shedding shivers of dust with my upstrokes. The notes in my portfolio were there, in case I lost my place, but I’d stared at this chart so much over the past couple of weeks that it was etched on the inside of my eyelids.

  Unseasonable cold for the next several years, then a return to “normal” and then … then the temperature kept rising. The line was slow at first, until it reached the tipping point, and suddenly spiked upward.

  When I hit that on the board, Nathaniel stepped forward, to the end of the conference table, and stood with his hands clasped in front of him. The conversation quieted.

  “In 1824, Joseph Fourier described an effect that Alexander Bell later called ‘the greenhouse effect.’ In it, particles in the air cause the atmosphere to retain heat. If the Meteor had struck land, the winter would have been longer. The fireball would have been larger. We thought it was fortunate that it struck water, but it’s worse. The Earth is going to come out of winter and get hotter. In fifty years, there will be no snow in North America.”

  The pudgy man who had complained about snow in California laughed. “Coming from Chicago, I gotta say this doesn’t strike me as a problem.”

  “How do you feel about one hundred percent humidity and summers with a low of one hundred and twenty degrees?”

  “Still. Weathermen can’t predict if it’s going to rain tomorrow. Fifty years is a long time out.”

  President Brannan raised his hand again. He was staring at me.
No. At the board. I stepped to the side so he could see it better. “Dr. York. What does the upturn on that chart represent?”

  “That … that is when the oceans begin to boil.”

  It was as if a jet engine had sucked the air out of the room. Someone said, “You can’t be serious. That’s—”

  President Brannan slapped his hand on the table. “I hope you’ll grant that I know something about the planet and how it behaves. We’re having this meeting because I’ve already looked over Dr. York’s figures and consider the problem serious. We’re not here, gentlemen, to debate the matter. We’re here to decide what to do about it.”

  Thank God. Brannan was only the acting president, until Congress could confirm him, which required a Congress, which required elections. But still … all the powers of the president were currently invested in him.

  He surveyed the room and then gestured to M. Scherzinger. “Will you take the floor?”

  “Certainly.” He stood and came to stand by Nathaniel. “Gentlemen. Mrs. York. There is a saying in Switzerland, ‘ Ne pas mettre tous ses œ ufs dans le m ê me panier,’ which you will know in English as, ‘Do not put all your eggs in one basket.’ The United Nations feels that, in addition to reducing the damage here on Earth, we must also look beyond our planet. It is time, gentlemen, to colonize outer space.”

  PART II

  TEN

  UN URGED TO AID THE UKRAINE

  Special to The National Times.

  ROME, Feb. 20, 1956—The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization today urged all member governments to consider immediately what assistance they could give to the Ukraine, part of the former Soviet Union, which is threatened with famine after the failure of its crops during the Meteor winters. The UN instructed its director general to continue to give, upon request of the Ukrainian Government, all appropriate assistance, technical or other, that lies within his authority and competence.

  Do you remember where you were when we put a man into space? I was one of two computer girls sitting in the International Aerospace Coalition’s “dark room” at Sunflower Mission Control in Kansas, with graph paper and my mechanical pencils. We used to launch from Florida, but that was before the Meteor, and before the NACA became part of the IAC. Sunflower already had a rocket facility from the war, so it made sense to relocate inland, away from the wrecked coast. Three miles away, the fruit of our labor sat on the launchpad: a Jupiter rocket with Stetson Parker strapped into a tiny pod atop 113 metric tons of propellant.

  Charming when he wanted to be, even I had to admit that he was a damn fine pilot. Unless we had really screwed up, he was going to be the first human into space. And if we screwed up, he’d be dead. Of the Artemis Seven astronauts, he was my least favorite, but I wanted him to survive this.

  The banks of instrument panels gave a soft glow to the room, and the sound-dampening panels they’d added to the walls kept voices low. Or as low as possible, given a room filled with 123 technicians. The air crackled with electricity. Men paced at the edges of the room. As lead engineer, poor Nathaniel was stuck in the New White House, waiting with President Brannan to talk to the press. They had two speeches written. Just in case.

  Across the small light-table from me, Huilang “Helen” Liu played chess with Reynard Carmouche, one of the French engineers, while we waited. Helen, the other computer girl, had joined the International Aerospace Coalition as part of the Taiwanese contingent. Apparently, she’d been a chess champion back home, which Mr. Carmouche hadn’t quite grasped yet.

  After liftoff, she’d be in charge of extracting the numbers from the Teletype and feeding them to me while I did the calculations to confirm that orbit had been attained. We’d been awake for sixteen hours, but I couldn’t have slept if you paid me. I really did need something to do with my hands. Myrtle had been trying to teach me to knit, but it hadn’t taken.

  From the small raised platform at the end of the room, the launch director said, “All positions are Go for launch commit.”

  I breathed out. The launch sequence was familiar and terrifying by this point. But no matter how many things we’d launched, this was the first one carrying a human life. You couldn’t help but think about the rockets that had ex ploded on the pad, or the ones that had made it into space carrying a monkey only to return a dead creature to the ground. I didn’t like Parker, but by God, he was brave.

  And I was deeply, intensely jealous of him.

  The mission director replied, “Roger, launch team. We are Go for launch.”

  Helen turned from the chess game and slid her chair closer to the Teletype. I straightened the graph paper in front of me.

  “Stand by for terminal countdown. We are T-minus ten … nine … eight … seven … six … five … four … ignition.”

  Parker’s voice crackled over the speaker with the roar of the rocket surrounding him. “Confirm ignition.”

  “… two … one … and LIFTOFF! We have liftoff.”

  Moments later, the thundering roar of the rocket ignition hit the room in a wave. It pulsed through my chest, even three miles away. Even in a concrete bunker. Even with sound dampening on the walls.

  I broke into a sweat. The only thing louder was a meteorite impact. If you were too close to the rocket during liftoff, the sound waves would literally shred you.

  “Confirm liftoff. Manual clock is started.”

  I picked up my pencil and poised it over the graph paper.

  “This is Hercules 7. The fuel is go. 1.2g. Cabin pressure at 14 psi. Oxygen is go.”

  As the rocket roared into the air, the Teletype sprang to life with information from tracking stations across the world. Helen started circling numbers as the text came off the machine. She tore the first piece of paper free and slid it across the table.

  I sank into the calculations. Raw numbers told the story of position and bearing, and it was my job to use those to reveal the rocket’s velocity as it left the Earth. I could see the rocket’s smooth, graceful rise in my mind, but plotted the ascent on a piece of graph paper for the men standing behind me.

  “Some vibrations. Sky is getting dark now.”

  That meant Parker was starting to exit the atmosphere. With each piece of paper Helen handed me, the line of the arc I traced continued upward within mission parameters. The roar of the rocket had faded, leaving an eerie silence. Around us, the male voices of engineers at work murmured in a quiet, intense call-and-response.

  “Guidance, your report?”

  Helen read the numbers from my page, her faint Taiwanese accent coming out with her excitement. “Velocity: 2,350 meters per second. Angle of elevation: four minutes of arc. Altitude: 101.98 kilometers.” Her voice was shockingly high amid the tenors and baritones of Mission Control.

  Eugene Lindholm, on comm, repeated the numbers to Parker. In response, he said, “Roger. It’s a lot smoother now.”

  The Teletype rattled constantly, and Helen slid another page over to me. I held my lower lip between my teeth as my pencil flew across the page. 6,420 meters per second. The first-stage engine cutoff should be soon.

  On the radio, “Cutoff.”

  “Confirm engine cutoff.”

  “I can see the booster falling away.”

  I glanced at the clock, counting the seconds along with everyone else. Half a minute after the booster dropped away, the escape tower should jettison. He’d be well and truly on his own, then.

  “Tower jettison is green.”

  “Confirm tower jettison.”

  Momentum carried Parker higher, and with the next page Helen handed me, I started to smile. 8,260 meters per second. Hellooooo orbital velocity. But I did the calculations on the page anyway, to show my work.

  “Periscope is coming out. Turnaround started.”

  “Confirm turnaround.”

  Behind me, Mr. Carmouche asked, “Why are you smiling?”

  I shook my head and drew one more dot on the graph at 280 kilometers above the surface. Getting Parker into space
was the first step. Achieving orbit required altering his trajectory, and that was all on him.

  “Switching to manual.” The radio continued to crackle as he left the channel open. “The view is … wish you all could see this.”

  “Roger, wish for seeing view confirmed.”

  Didn’t we all wish for that? If he orbited successfully, that got us one step closer to a space station, which got us a step closer to the moon base. And then Mars, Venus, and the rest of the solar system.

  Helen gave me another sheet from the Teletype. I tracked Parker’s position by shifts in Doppler frequency. The frequency of those waves showed the rocket’s path over the Earth. I plugged the numbers into the string of calculations and then ran through it again, just to be sure.

  Turning in my seat, I lifted the page over my head. “He made it! He’s in orbit.”

  Grown men jumped from their seats, shouting like kids at a ball game. One fellow threw paper into the air, and it fluttered down around us. Someone clapped me on the shoulder, and there was a sudden warm wet pressure on my cheek. I pulled back, glaring at Mr. Carmouche, whose lips were still puckered from the kiss.

  “We still have to get him home.” I wiped my cheek off and set my pencil on the page again. Across the table, Helen met my gaze and nodded. Then she handed me the next sheet of paper.

  * * *

  The light from the hall outside our rented apartment fell across the bed. I rolled over as Nathaniel’s silhouette entered, muffled by his overcoat. The light from the bathroom reflected only on his shoes, and the snow still caught in his trouser cuffs.

  “I’m not asleep.” That was mostly true. I’d left the Murphy bed down before I went to Mission Control that morning because I knew we’d both be too tired to deal with it after the launch. “Congratulations.”

  “To you as well.” He took off his overcoat and hung it on the peg by the front door. Housing prices in Kansas City had skyrocketed after President Brannan relocated the capital to the center of the country. Between that and all the refugees who needed homes, the only place we could afford, even with a government salary, was a studio apartment. Frankly, I was happy not to have much house to keep up with.