Going Interstellar

by Les Johnson

“No. She’s completely shut down, Morris.” He said it as if he were talking to a six-year-old.

  “Okay.” Morris tried to assume a calm demeanor. “How long ago?”

  “It’s been about five hours. She missed her report and we’ve been trying to raise her since.”

  “All right.”

  “We’re trying to keep it quiet. But we won’t be able to do that much longer.”

  The Coraggio, with its fusion drive and array of breakthrough technology, had arrived in the Kuiper Belt two days earlier and at 3:17 a.m. Eastern Time had reported sighting its objective, the plutoid Minetka. It had been the conclusion of a 4.7 billion-mile flight.

  Morris was always unfailingly optimistic. It was a quality he needed during these days of increasingly tight budgets. “It’s probably just a transmission problem, Denny.”

  “I hope so! But I doubt it.”

  “So what are we doing?”

  “Right now, we’re stalling for time. And hoping Lucy comes back up.”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  “That’s why I’m calling you. Look, we don’t want to be the people who lost a twenty-billion-dollar vehicle. If she doesn’t respond, we’re going to have to go out after her.”

  “Is the Excelsior ready?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  “So what do you need from me, Denny?”

  He hesitated. “Baker just resigned.”

  “Oh. Already?”

  “Well, he’s going to be resigning.”

  Over in the museum, one of the high school students asked a question about the Apollo flights, what it felt like to be in a place where there was no gravity. The teacher directed it to me, and I answered as best I could, saying that it was a little like being in water, that you just sort of floated around, but that you got used to it very quickly. Meantime I made a rook move against Herman, pinning a knight. Then Morris said what he was thinking. “I’m sorry to hear it.” It was an accusation.

  “Sometimes we have to make sacrifices, Morris. Maybe we’ll get a break and they’ll come back up.”

  “But nobody expects it to happen.”

  “No.” There was a sucking sound: Calkin chewing on his lower lip.

  “It leaves us without an operations chief.”

  “That’s why—”

  “—You need me.”

  “Yes, Morris, that’s why we need you. I want you to come to the Cape posthaste and take over.”

  “Do you have any idea at all what the problem might be?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So you’re just going to send the Excelsior out and hope for the best.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  “In all probability, you’ve had a breakdown in the comm system. Or it’s the AI.”

  “That’s my guess.”

  “You’ve checked the comm system in the Excelsior?”

  “Not yet. They’re looking at it now.”

  “Good. What about the AI?”

  “We’re going to run some tests on Jeri, too. Don’t worry about it, Morris, okay? You just get down here and launch this thing.”

  “Denny, Jeri and Lucy are both Bantam level-3 systems.”

  “So what are you saying, Morris? Those are the best SIs we have. You know that.”

  “I also know they’re untested.”

  “That’s not true. We ran multiple simulations—”

  “That’s not the same as onboard operations.”

  “Morris, there’s no point doing all those tests again. We’d get the same results. There’s nothing wrong with the Bantams.”

  “Okay, Denny. But we’ve got a battle-tested system already. We know it works. Why not use it?”

  “Because we’ve spent too much money on the Bantams, damn it.”

  “Denny, Sara’s done all the test flights with the Coraggio. If we use her, it removes one potential source of trouble from the equation.”

  I liked the sound of that. I’d have smiled if I could, while I finished a press release for an upcoming welcome-back event for several cosmonauts and astronauts. I felt sorry for them. They’d been on active duty for an average of nineteen years, and none of them had ever gotten beyond the space station. Calkin responded just as I was sending the document to the public information office. “We’ll talk about it when you get here.”

  He hung up, and it was a long minute before Morris put the phone down. He’d been an astronaut himself, more years ago than he wanted to remember. Now he sat staring out the window. And finally he took a deep breath: “Sara?”

  “I heard, Morris.”

  “What do you think?”

  “The most vulnerable piece of equipment on the ship is the AI.”

  “You wouldn’t really mind that, would you? If the Bantams are screwed up some way.”

  “That’s not true, Morris. I’m just answering your question.”

  “And you’d love to go to the rescue, right?”

  “As opposed to what? Opening the mail in the Admin Building? Sure.”

  “Yeah. It would be nice. But don’t get your hopes up, kid.”

  The Bantam Level-3 was billed as the most advanced AI on the planet. I’m a Level-2, and I’m a Telstar product, purchased during a previous period of austerity.

  The Bantams, Lucy and Jeri, were easy to get along with, and did not adopt a superior attitude. It would in fact have surprised me had they done so. They were simply too smart to behave like that. Sure, I was moderately jealous of the attention they received, and maybe of their abilities. How could I not be? Still, I kept it under control, and we’d become friends despite having only limited time together. It’s what civilized entities do. When they arrived I was conducting training simulations at the Kennedy Space Center. A few days later, suddenly redundant, I was shipped to Huntsville.

  I hated thinking of Lucy adrift out there, in the Kuiper Belt almost five billion miles from Earth. She was probably trying to deal with a power failure. Which meant she might be alone in a dark ship so far away that a radio transmission would take seven and a half hours to reach her.

  I’d been picked up during the Global Space Initiative with high hopes of leading the exploration of the solar system, and ultimately taking the new VR-2 vehicle, with its fusion engines, into the era of interstellar travel.

  But I shouldn’t complain. I did get offworld. I’d taken the Coraggio to the asteroid belt on a test run. There, I’d secured an asteroid to the grappler and used it to fuel the return flight. And that had been about it for me. Although more than any astronaut had managed, it was nothing close to what I’d been led to expect. So yes, the disappearance of the Coraggio presented a golden opportunity, and I would have given anything to take over the Excelsior or the Audacia and ride to Lucy’s rescue. It wouldn’t happen, though. Not with Jeri available. So I decided to try for a compromise. “Morris, couldn’t you send us both out? It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a back-up. Just in case.”

  “You mean send both ships?”

  “No, that wouldn’t work politically. But why not, just as insurance, maybe put us both in one or the other?”

  He grinned weakly. “Sara, I would if I could. In fact, I’d like to go myself.”

  “Morris, there’s an article by Harvey Bradshaw in the current Scientific American. He says there won’t be any humans on any of the interstellar flights. Ever. So why do we keep pretending?”

  “Really? He said Ever?”

  “Well, something like that. You know the argument.”

  He nodded. “I know.”

  The shortest feasible trip to any star was twenty-five years one way, and that would be to Alpha Centauri, where there was apparently not a thing worth looking at. Barnard’s Star was the only nearby destination of serious interest: one of its worlds was right in the middle of the biozone, and had an oxygen atmosphere, which very possibly meant life. And that, of course, from a human perspective, was the only reason to go. But Barnard’s lay twice as far as Alpha Centauri. So
no. Unless Captain Kirk’s Enterprise showed up, nobody was going anywhere . . . at least for a while.

  Except us machines.

  Moreover, no one could see an economic advantage to the space program. And the various governments supporting GSI were all struggling to stay fiscally afloat. None of this, of course, was news to Morris. He knew the politics. Knew the science. Knew the math. But he had real trouble buying into the death of a dream. He sat staring out the window, his eyes probably fixed on the admin building, or maybe just on Lunar Park. Finally he made a resigned sound deep in his throat. “Sara?”

  “Yes, Morris?”

  “How serious are you? About wanting to go after the Coraggio?”

  “Are you kidding? I’d do anything.”

  He took a deep breath. “All right,” he said finally. “No promises, but I’ll try—”

  Had there been a few people aboard the Coraggio, the media would have been all over us. People might be in trouble. Get out there and do the rescue. Breaking news all over the place. But, of course, you didn’t have to worry about an AI using up the available supply of oxygen, or freezing because of a climate-control malfunction, or whatever. In fact, you didn’t have to worry about an AI at all. And that realization didn’t help. Public interest focused instead on the inefficiency of the people who’d sent a multi-billion dollar vehicle out into the Kuiper Belt, and lost it.

  I wasn’t connected to operational radio communications, so if a message arrived from Lucy, I wouldn’t know about it until someone told me. And so, during the first few hours after Calkin’s call, I was constantly asking whether we’d heard anything. I could see that everyone was coming to regard me as a nuisance, and finally Morris promised to let me know if the situation changed. “Immediately,” he added.

  Late that afternoon, he came back from a conference. “Sara,” he said, “I can’t promise anything, but you and I are headed for the Cape.”

  A technician came in and disconnected me. That eliminated my visual capability, though I could still hear what was going on around me. Morris wrapped me in plastic and put me in his briefcase. Then we took the elevator down to the first floor. “A car’s waiting for us,” he said.

  “Are Mary and the kids coming?” I asked.

  “No, Sara. We didn’t want to pull the guys out of school. I’ll bring everybody out in June.”

  An hour later we boarded a small jet with two other passengers and headed for the Cape.

  The other passengers knew about the Coraggio. They were being called in to run tests on the Excelsior.

  Once in the air, Morris took me out of the briefcase. “Morris,” I said, trying to sound perfectly cool, “what are my chances?”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t pushed for it yet, Sara. But you wouldn’t have any kind of chance at all if you’re not there when the decision gets made.”

  “Okay.”

  “We can’t rush this.” He put one hand on my casing. “I’ll keep you informed.”

  “Make sure Calkin knows I took the Coraggio out to the asteroid belt.”

  “He knows. I’ve already reminded him.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “It’s beautiful out there,” he said.

  At first I thought we were still talking about the asteroid belt. Then I realized he was looking out the window. I couldn’t see him, of course. Anyhow, it was only an attempt to change the subject. One of the other passengers, a woman with a soft voice, had apparently overheard us talking and asked about me. He introduced me, and we began discussing NASA’s current state. The President, in his weekly press conference held while we were headed for the airport, had denied that more cuts were coming. The Coraggio story broke while he was still onstage. Somebody asked what had happened. Another reporter wanted to know whether it wasn’t time to quit on the space program and stop wasting money. The President tried to sound reassuring.

  I didn’t really know what I was hoping for. Lucy reporting back that she was okay? Or a blown drive unit and me riding to the rescue? It seemed unlikely they’d give me a chance to do that, though I thought it would have been the right move. We took to making small talk, which I’m not good at. So I focused my attention on the radio. We were already the prime topic on several talk shows. On NPR’s Afternoon Bill, the host predicted that even if we found the Coraggio, wholesale changes would ensue at NASA. A reporter from the Washington Post thought we should be closed down: “Let’s face reality, Bill. Space flight’s expensive, and we get no benefit from it. It’s time to back off.”

  The Jake Wallace Show had Marvin Clavis as a guest. Clavis had done the breakthrough work to put together the fusion drive. When asked for his opinion about what might have gone wrong, he admitted that, at this stage, everything was guesswork.

  But he had a prediction: “If they haven’t heard from the Coraggio within the next few hours, they’ll never find her.”

  I doubted that twenty percent of the population had even heard of the Coraggio, and maybe half that many who might have known her mission. This despite the fact that the program had been wildly successful . . . until now, of course.

  But no human beings were aboard, and if the VR-2 ever did leave for Barnard’s Star, nobody would go along for that ride either. So why would anyone care? With the fusion drive, the VR-2s were allegedly capable of getting up to six percent of light speed on a full load of fuel. An incredible velocity, and an achievement that, a few years earlier, had seemed hopelessly beyond reach.

  Eventually, according to plan, each of the three vehicles would receive a destination, Barnard’s Star, Wolf 359, and Lalande 21185. The closest projected launch date, to Wolf 359, was six months away. The other two would happen during the following year. Incredibly, some people still wondered why we weren’t headed for Centauri.

  The flight to Barnard’s Star, nearest of the three, would require fifty years—one way. Even had Captain Future been aboard, nobody was going to get excited. Call me later.

  I knew Morris pretty well. Despite what he said, he wasn’t prepared to accept the possibility that the program would ever shut down. Not now, especially after President Ferguson had managed to put together the Global Space Initiative. After Clavis and his team had provided the fusion reactor. When success seemed so close.

  Ed Sakkinen, on Coffee With Ed, was outraged. “Why are we spending so much money to send a robot ship to visit a rock anyway? I still don’t get it.”

  Rita D’Esposito, NBC’s White House correspondent, tried to make sense of the project: “Ed, a lot of people think that, unless we establish ourselves on Mars, or somewhere, eventually the human race will take a fatal hit. Maybe by an asteroid, or a nuclear war. Or climate change. Something will take us out.”

  “When’s the last time that happened?” Ed asked.

  She sighed. “It only has to happen once.”

  Sakkinen laughed.

  “Listen,” she said, “a rock crashed in Siberia near the beginning of the last century. It didn’t do much other than knock down a lot of trees. But if it had been maybe a half-mile wider, it would have been goodbye baby for all of us.”

  A political consultant on the show sounded annoyed: “Some people argue that if we don’t go to Mars and set up I don’t know, malls out there somewhere, we’ll just wind up hanging out on the front porch.”

  Armand Hopper, on Round Table, demanded to know how many more damned ways the government could find to waste money. Simultaneously, he was beating the drums for a military intervention in Uzbekistan.

  Fortunately, it was a short flight to the Cape, and when the Political Roughnecks began arguing that the space age was over and it was time for us all to grow up, Morris told me that we’d begun our descent into the spaceport. He noted that this was the first time he’d been flown into the space center. “It’s nice to be a VIP,” he added.

  We touched down on the skid strip, and Morris said something about welcome to Cape Canaveral. When the plane stopped moving he put me back in the briefcase. �
��Sorry, Sara,” he said. “I’ll get you connected as soon as I can.”

  It wasn’t a problem. I was glad to have gotten that far.

  We went directly into the Ops and Checkout Building, where Morris contacted Calkin. “We’re on the ground,” he said.

  “Good. We have a lot of work to do.”

  “Any change in the situation?”

  “Nothing, Morris. Not a peep. The son of a bitch is gone.”

  “Denny, did you make a decision yet on the Excelsior?”

  “What kind of decision?”

  “Just in case you want to use a proven AI, I brought Sara along.”

  Calkin thought that was funny. “Good man.”

  “Denny, when do we expect to launch?”

  “Looks like Thursday.” Four days.

  “We can’t move it up?”

  “We’re fitting the Excelsior with robots and some other equipment in case the Coraggio needs repairs. We need to get it right this time, Morris. And I know time’s a factor. We’re doing the best we can.”

  Getting there would take two months. If the Coraggio were drifting, it could be pretty far away by then.

  Lucy and Jeri were good. Nobody knew that better than I did, and I couldn’t argue the logic when the Telstar Coordinators were moved into second place. Admittedly I’d hoped from the beginning that there’d be a problem, that they would be found wanting in some critical way. And I know what that suggests about my character, but I told myself that I couldn’t be responsible for defects in my programming. In truth, I was perfectly capable of taking the VR-2 to Minetka, or to Barnard’s Star, or anywhere else in the neighborhood. But it was time to face reality. My window of opportunity had been open only a short time, less than a year, and now it had closed. I’d never again see a day when I wasn’t taking phone messages.

  Unless something went seriously wrong.

  I’d admitted my jealousy to them and asked if there was a possibility they might come up short. “For me,” I added.

  You might think Lucy wasn’t capable of smiling, but I heard it in her tone. “Anything not prohibited by physical law,” she told me, “is possible.” There was a long moment during which I became conscious of the electronic hum of her protocols. “Sara, I understand. I’d feel the same way. I wish there were something I could do.”