After parking, Mike sat in his car and went over his mental to do list. “One more phone call to make, this will be the tough one,” he thought to himself. He hit the contact number for Dr. Mary Beth Davis, director of Hubble Space Telescope operations at JPL. “Hey Mary Beth, this is Mike Banscott. Yep, just getting ready to bug out for the weekend, but I have to go to Washington to try and meet with David Holstein at NASA. No, I know that does not sound like a fun weekend. No, Patricia is not going with me. Yes, it is related to funding issues. But listen, that is not the reason I called. I need a really, really big favor. Mary Beth, we have known each other a long time or I would not ask this of you. I need you to arrange me some priority time on the Hubble. Yes, I know that is asking the impossible. No, Mary Beth, I have not filled out the study requests, but if you insist I will get them submitted as soon as I can. No Mary Beth, this definitely cannot wait about four to five months for a time slot. I need you to do a priority override and get these studies by Monday.”
David held the phone away from his ear. He had not realized that Mary Beth was even capable of the language she was using. After her tirade had ended he spoke up. “Mary Beth, I told you it was a big favor. I would not ask you to do it unless it was very, very important. What am I looking for? I am looking for a Brown Dwarf. Yes, I understand that Hubble is not the ideal instrument for that, but this one is not that far away, I think. I understand Mary, but unless I am mistaken, Hubble might be able to see this one if we are lucky. How close...well within one light year I would think. Yes, you heard me right. I really need this study done Mary, and I need the results and reason for the search kept under wraps until I can talk to David Holstein. I understand Mary. Just see what you can do. I am going to email you the coordinates and if you can do a narrow field search around those it should suffice. Sure, sure, looking for a suspected new comet would be a good excuse…or say a gyroscope is acting up. Just make something up. I will be in Washington, call me on my cell phone. Thanks Mary Beth, I owe you a big one!” Mike grabbed his keys and headed toward his office. “It is going to be a long weekend,” he told himself.
Chapter 4
March 19th, 2016
Washington, DC
Mike Banscott departed his plane at the Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington at 7:40 am Saturday morning. He had left LAX airport in Los Angeles almost five hours ago but due to a weather delay and the time difference it was morning here in Washington and he had been up all night without sleep. The woman across the airplane aisle from him had fussed and messed with her two year old the entire flight. They should just not allow children in first class he had decided. It made it impossible to sleep. He contemplated taking a taxi to the government vehicle lot to pick up his car, but he was so tired at the moment he just could not bear the thought of driving. He chose instead to go straight to his hotel room.
After checking in and going up to his room, he did not even bother to get undressed. He just shed his shoes, pulled the blanket up and fell into a fitful sleep. He awoke at three o’clock that afternoon. Damn he thought, I forgot to set the alarm on my phone. Picking up his phone he attempted to check his messages. As soon as he turned his phone on it immediately went into battery saving mode and it started blinking to let him know that the phone had less than five percent of its battery life left. “Damn, damn, damn,” he said to himself. His trip was not off to an auspicious start. He dug his wall charger out of his luggage and plugged his phone in to charge while he shuffled into the bathroom for a shower and shave.
Feeling much more alert after his shower, he put on a pair of slacks, a shirt, and checked his phone again. It indicated his battery was back up to twenty percent, so he could now check his messages. His face broke into a big grin. He was going to have to get his secretary Mattie back at JPL a raise. She had left a message for him that Dr. David Honstein had invited him over to dinner at his house at five o’clock today. “Oh shit, five o’clock,” that was going to be cutting it close he realized.
He grabbed his laptop, satchel, keys, and ran out the door. He was halfway down the hall when he turned and ran back to the room and grabbed the car charger for his phone. “Thank God for navigation and map programs,” he thought, but they were worthless if his phone was dead. He hailed a taxi at the lobby and headed for the Government car lot to pick up his car. From the looks of the address and the route on his Google map application, he might just make it by five pm. He was lucky it was a Saturday and not rush hour during a week day.
Mike pulled into the driveway of the suburban Washington home promptly at five o’clock. He rang the doorbell and it was answered by a darling little girl with blonde hair who looked about five or six years old. “Can I help you?” she asked. “We don’t want any today, and I am not supposed to talk to you anymore because you are a stranger.” Then she shut the door in his face. Eric just stood there a moment and checked his email to make sure he had the right address. The door opened again, and this time he was greeted by a face he knew, Dr. David Honstein, Director of NASA. “Come in Mike. Come in, sorry about Sally, my granddaughter. She can make it to the door before I can even get out of my chair. Sally dear; run tell your granny that our company is here. If you will come with me Eric, it is so pretty out this evening we are going to grill some steaks out on the patio. We’ll stop and grab a beer from the kitchen on the way.”
On the way through the kitchen David said, “I have not seen you but once or twice since the Spitzer project ended. I see your name on lots of budget requests from JPL though. I usually have the uh, misfortune of disapproving a lot of your requests. I do hope you do not hold that against me. Right now though, let’s enjoy dinner and we will talk about what brought you out east after we stuff ourselves.”
A delicious dinner of steak, grilled corn, and salad was served and was accompanied by the charming company of David’s wife and his granddaughter Sally. Afterwards, Mike and David sat down and nursed a couple of more beers in lawn chairs on the patio. Sally and her grandmother had left to go do some shopping for some springtime clothes so they had the house to themselves. Your wife is just as attractive and charming as I remembered her and your granddaughter is adorable,” Mike complimented. “Does Sally live with you?”
“Oh no,” replied David. She comes and stays for a couple weeks every spring and fall. At least she has been the past few years. She starts school this fall so that will probably and unfortunately change. We will definitely miss the time she comes and spends with us.”
David cleared his throat and said, “I love the chit chat Mike, but I know that you did not have your secretary track me down so you could fly all the way to Washington just to have a steak dinner with me. What can I help you with that is so pressing? I want to warn you it better not be a project budget request. You know that NASA’s budget has been whacked and trimmed to the point where we are going to have to start staying home and watch the Chinese explore the universe while we sit here and buy all the things they make to sell us.”
Mike stood up to pace. “I will try and condense all of this down for you and get right to the point of my being here. Have you heard of Doctor Eric Casselman? He is a professor of astrophysics and astronomy at Cal Tech.”
“I seem to recall coming across him at a conference somewhere before,” said David.
“Well,” said Mike. “It appears that one of his grad students, and a very observant one at that, has discovered a previously un-noticed brown dwarf. We are guessing it is a low to mid-range Y classification.”
That is quite an accomplishment,” said David. “Unless I am mistaken there has been maybe only one Y class dwarf confirmed and there was debate about whether it was a gas giant or a dwarf star. How did he find it, by detecting orbital variations in a binary pair?”
“No,” replied Mike, he actually found it with direct observation from some old Spitzer Telescope studies.”
“So Mike, what do you want from me? The discovery is interesting but not something that would drag yo
u all the way out to Washington to inform me on a weekend. If you are asking me to give him a job then I probably cannot help you. We are actually cutting staff and having to let some very good people go as it is.”
Mike stopped pacing and turned to David. “No David, I am not here trying to be a job reference for the young man. This Brown Dwarf he has found is close by, and we need some assets to study it in a more detail.”
David frowned at him. “So I was right, you are here asking for budget money. That is what I suspected and the answer is no.”
Mike shook his head. “David, you do not understand. This dwarf is close by; probably well within a light year of us. And the kicker is that it is getting closer.”
David went from shaking his head negatively to giving Mike his full attention. “How much closer are you talking about?” David asked.
Mike answered slowly. “The data that we have leads us to believe that it is likely going to pass very close to our solar system. That is why I am here. I think some people need to start looking at this thing more closely. We really need some more data to determine just how close it is and determine its trajectory. All we know now is that it is coming in from about twenty degrees above the ecliptic and that there is almost no bearing change since initial observations. Those initial observations are over eight years old.”
David shook his head in disbelief. “Mike, I find it hard to believe that a Brown Dwarf Star, even a very small one, could get that close to our solar system and no one has noticed it. That is just incredulous.”
“Not really,” said Mike. “It is giving off very little heat and almost no light. If our theories on Brown Dwarfs are correct, it is probably covered in dense clouds that would reflect what little heat and light there is back inward toward itself. Nobody has been looking for a Brown Dwarf in our stellar neighborhood. They are all searching for planets orbiting other stars light years away. That is where the glory and accolades can be found now days. All of our present Earth based telescopes are limited to near infrared bands, and most of them are wide aperture and could miss something this small, comparatively speaking. We need some fresh observations and we need them now. I only know of one asset that could possibly do that in the near future and I do not have control over it.”
“What might that be?” asked David.
“A RLARIRS satellite might be able to do it.” Mike said.
“That would probably take a presidential order to get the NSA to release one to us,” David replied. “And, that is assuming that they even admit they have it. That capability is considered a national security secret, and we would probably both be castrated and have our security clearances removed for discussing it here in my backyard. “I think we need another beer, I’ll be right back.”
David came back out on the patio with two more cold beers. “I may have an idea,” he said as he handed a beer to Mike. “President Montgomery has her monthly science briefing next Thursday. I will try to get hold of Donald Masterfield, her science advisor, and see if he will add us onto her briefing agenda. If so, we can try and make her see that this is serious enough that we need to devote more national assets to check this out. Someone else will eventually discover this thing, and when they do, all hell could break lose. If you think the end of the world nuts were crazy when they predicted the world was going to end in 2012 then you just wait. They will all say this is the mythical planet Nibiru come to destroy the world. We have got to study this thing and get the facts out before a lunatic announces it and the world goes nuts. I want you to stay in Washington until the briefing on Thursday. See what information you can get from any other observatories that have a view of that area, but do it discreetly. I do not want this getting out of hand and the information being prematurely disseminated.”
“David,” interrupted Mike. “I am not sure I can stay until Thursday. I have several things going back at JPL that I cannot just let drop. There some other people who may be of more use to you. I probably need to get back to my work now that I have brought this to your attention.”
“Bullshit,” replied David. “Michael Heckerman, your old boss on the Spitzer Telescope gave you rave reviews in your annual evaluations. He said you practically ran the Spitzer Project while he did paperwork. He had highly recommended you be given your own project to run. Poor guy is now drooling spit down his chin in a nursing home here in Washington. Alzheimer’s is not a pretty way to go out of this world.”
“Ultimately, I am your boss since JPL is under NASA, and as of now you are in charge of organizing the observation and study of this Brown Dwarf. Get yourself an assistant if you need too and I want you to set up an office and get organized for this task. JPL is probably as good a place as any to set up shop since you are already out there, but I want you to stay here until Thursday. I will get some discretionary funding released for whatever you need, as long as it is not too crazy. And remember, keep this on a need to know basis for the time being.”
“I sort of preempted you on some of that,” Mike said. “I asked Mary Beth over at Hubble to divert some telescope time to look for our object of interest. Maybe by Monday, she may have some more information. I think I hear your wife and granddaughter coming back in. I guess I will go grab a few hours of sleep and figure out who I can turn over funding requests to back at JPL,” Mike said as he stood to leave. “Give my thanks to your wife for dinner.”
“I will call you Monday morning,” David called after him. “Hey Mike, it might be a good idea to try and put a muzzle on that Grad student for a few weeks until we can work all this out. Not really sure how you can do that. Maybe you can lean on Eric Casselman, his professor, to rein him in.”
Mike turned around and grinned. “I have a better idea; you said to get an assistant, so what better way to keep him under wraps than to have him working for me. I will talk to you on Monday.”
Chapter 5
March 20th 2016
Pasadena, California
Dr. Eric Casselman hung the phone up and sat back down to his routine breakfast of oatmeal and dates. “We are such creatures of habit,” he thought. “I have had the same breakfast every morning for years and years. If I do anything different at all, it is to use raisins instead of dates in my oatmeal,” He chuckled to himself. “It is no wonder that I never married. I am forty three years old and have yet to meet a woman that would tolerate me. I am getting old, set in my ways, and my work has always been more exciting to me than any woman.” There had been one woman about twenty one years ago that had caught his eye. They had a quick and intense summer relationship and then he had lost interest in the relationship. She had realized that he would always be married more to his work than he could to any woman. She had left college and moved back out east where she had an aunt that she was close to when she realized that their relationship had started to wane.
His thoughts turned back to the phone call that had interrupted his Sunday morning solitude. Mike Banscott had just called him from Washington. Evidently, the Brown Dwarf, if that was what it was proven to be, was starting to stir the cold congealed pot of porridge that NASA and JPL had become with all the recent budget cuts. He looked at his own oatmeal and smiled. Comparing NASA to his own breakfast, it was probably good to stir in something new to that bowl of oatmeal. He glanced at the clock on the stove. It appeared that JPL shared his evaluation of the data that Peter had dug up. “I believe,” he said to himself, “that the field of astronomy and astrophysics is going to become a very hot subject in the near future.”
Mike had asked him to try and contain the information about Peter’s discovery for a few months, if possible. With that thought in mind, he picked up his phone again and called Peter Rockwell. “Good morning to you, Peter,” he said when Peter answered his phone. “I just got off the phone with an old friend over at JPL and I believe that it is going to be safe to say that you can use that data after all. Yes, yes, I am sure that is great news to you. Do you actually have a rough draft of your paper done? Excellent. Listen
, why don’t you bring it over this afternoon around four pm and leave it with me to look over. Matter of fact, why don’t you bring Susan with you and we will grill some burgers and dogs and celebrate with you. Yes, he did think he knew the source of the artifact you were having problems with. No, I will try and explain all that when you guys come over. I will see you both at four.”
Eric stood up and went to get his golf shoes. If he was lucky, he could get in eighteen holes, grab some burger supplies, and still be home by four. He grimaced as he had a dark thought that there may not be as much time for golf in the future if things panned out the way he was afraid they would.
…
After Dr. Eric Casselman hung up, Peter was dancing around his apartment in ecstasy. He could use his data after all. That meant that all he had left to do was just a few final touches to his paper and he would pay someone to do a final edit for grammar and syntax. He would be done. He could submit it to the Astrophysics Department for review and analysis and then prepare to defend his theory. He would be done with all his post grad requirements and the culmination of his work for his Ph.D. “Damn,” he said to himself. “After this semester I will have to look for a real job.” That thought brought him back down to Earth, only for a moment though.
He grabbed his beach bag and headed out the door. He had to pick up Susan at her apartment and then they were going to the beach. On the way home, they would stop at Dr. Casselman’s for burgers. Peter was halfway to his car, when he stopped and shook his head. Damn, he had left his rough draft back in his apartment. He ran back to the apartment, grabbed the draft copy, and his sunglasses that he had also forgotten, and ran for the car. He could not wait to pick up Susan. He hoped she would be happy for him after she heard the news he could use his data. He was sure she would be thrilled that Dr. Casselman wanted to review his draft paper himself before Peter submitted it.
Dark Star Rising Second Edition (Pebbles in The Sky) Page 4