Encounter with Tiber [v1.0]

by By Buzz Aldrin

  No question that individual Tiberians had failed, for all their courage, fortitude, and intelligence. But no question either that as a culture the Tiberians had found at least one way to pass something on, to defy the cosmic oblivion descending on them. As for what had happened to them as a species, we didn’t know yet. That would have to wait at least for decades until there was any reply from the radio broadcasts to the visited worlds; and maybe a century until exploration ships reached all of them.

  Failure? What a silly way to look at it. In an intelligent species everybody dies, and perhaps most without learning any really new thing, but every generation can push back the ignorance a little farther.

  The phrase stuck in her head, and she found herself holding an imaginary conversation with Uncle Jason. He seemed to tell her to just tell the story, get it recorded, and make his story part of humanity’s. And something about that, finally, gave her the urge to get to work, and sit down and tell Uncle Jason’s story. She set down her wineglass and headed back toward the room she shared with Sanetomo.

  But before she reached the door, there was wild cheering. She turned and saw that the Fast Low Altitude Probe had succeeded in making a pass just above the glowing face of Proxima; she stayed to watch that. The deep red marked by black hurricanes bigger than the Earth itself whirled away beneath, often leaping up in great red peaks and sometimes boiling up in orange sheets. Then, as the probe whipped on around the dim little red sun, the hyperbolic orbit carried it away. The eternal stars popped into view, and the probe, having finished the job it was designed to do in less than half an hour, fell away into the eternal dark and cold, to go wherever it might for the next few thousands of millennia. It rotated 180 degrees and looked back as long as it could, but at its tremendous speed it was a very short time before it saw nothing but blackness, and then its radio signal faded.

  It was the kind of machine an intelligent species might build, Clio said to herself. She headed back to her desk to start playing through Uncle Jason’s tapes one more time.

  * * * *

  PART IV

  FIRST CLEAR L1GHT

  2017-2035

  * * * *

  1

  I HAD KNOWN LORI KIRSTEN ALMOST MY WHOLE L1FE; MY MOTHER AND S1G had even encouraged me to call her “Aunt Lori.” Fate, which seemed to enjoy playing some obscure game with me, had made her the head of the astronaut corps just three days after I was accepted into astronaut training. She had had no influence on my getting in, but since she had been my father’s closest friend, and everyone knew who my father was, my arriving at the same time she did was taken as evidence of my legendary “pull” and “influence.” I got the usual hassle about it, and I dealt with it the usual way—I tried to do so well that everyone would agree that I had deserved the chance anyway.

  It didn’t work. It never had. By the time that I became an astronaut and Lori became head of the corps, though, I was twenty-eight, and I’d come to understand how things worked. Plenty of people would take me for what I was: not an extroverted genius like my dad, but just a guy who liked to fly in space and was really good at it. I had made friends at the Air Force Academy, in flight training, in my assignments, and finally in the astronaut corps, even if it was a little more difficult at first because my name was Jason Terence and I was a small part of a famous story.

  One thing I had to be careful about, though, was not socializing too much with Aunt Lori when anyone might see. With more than a thousand astronauts in the corps, it would look fishy for a mere rocket jockey to have lunch with the boss. Generally we saw each other at my mother and Sig’s place, where we could “coincidentally” bump into each other and catch up. For several years I saw Aunt Lori only at such gatherings, or on the rare occasions when she’d visit my squadron. By now, at age thirty-four, even though Aunt Lori was nominally my boss, I thought of her mainly as an old family friend I didn’t see very often.

  So I worked hard at my career and flew a lot, mostly taking crews of scientists up or down between the LEO ports Glenn or Shepherd, or sometimes out to the collection of habitats and trusses at the old Star Chaser, to Canaveral or Edwards, on Yankee Clippers, the first true single-stage-to-orbit system.

  And I thought of Lori Kirsten as Aunt Lori when I saw her socially and as Chief Kirsten whenever I had to think about the commander of the astronaut corps. Thus it felt very strange when out of nowhere, in October 2032, I got orders to report to her office the next morning at the Johnson spacecraft Center outside Houston, especially because she had pulled me of a scheduled Clipper flight to do it, and NASA was still a little short of qualified Clipper pilots.

  Bill Amundsen, my squadron commander, was as puzzled as I was; he saw me off at the airfield, and while we waited for the early flight, he asked, once again, “And you have no idea what it’s about?”

  “None at all,” I said. “If she’d wanted me to know she’d have phoned. You know how she is; she’s still not used to there being such a big organization that there has to be a regular chain of command.”

  “Oh yeah.” He half chuckled. “She didn’t phone you, but she phoned me. Just making sure I wouldn’t offer any resistance.”

  “Resistance to what?”

  “Well, first of all, to pulling you from the upcoming flight. I think you’re right, sometimes she forgets how much space flight goes on these days. If you get back soon enough, you’ll still be flying into space, what, eight times this year? She still remembers when getting scrubbed from a mission might mean years before you got a chance again.” He paused, and squinted at the transport rolling toward us in the bright Florida sunlight.

  I let him have a minute, and then said, “You said ‘first of all.’ What else was she worried about you resisting?”

  “Hmmph.” Very softly he said, “You didn’t hear this, Jason. But she told me if I cooperated I could have my pick from the replacement pool.”

  The hair on the back of my neck rose. Whatever she had in mind would involve transferring me out of the First Aerospace Squadron. And I liked it here. I had been flying out of here for almost four years now, and besides handling flights up to orbit, I had made enough trips between the LEO ports (usually just Shepherd to Glenn or vice versa, but every so often out to the L1 Port Armstrong), and enough trips to the Moon to maintain my rating on Pigeons, the workhorse ships for orbital operations. Because I worked a lot, and never turned down a mission, I got used a lot, which was what I wanted. Also, I knew and liked the other astronauts in the First, and they accepted me.

  And why was Aunt Lori reaching down into the low levels of the organization like this? If I was wanted in some other squadron, normally that would have been worked out between Bill and whoever the squadron commander was.

  “Well,” I said, “if worse comes to worst, I’ll have to come back to pack. We can get people together for a beer or something before I go. Just to make sure—if I turn whatever it is down, you won’t mind if I stay here?”

  He shook his head, laughing. “You log more hours per year and you earn higher ratings than anyone else. I’d rather have you here. But when Lori Kirsten tells me this is a bad time to make waves, I don’t.”

  I nodded. “Okay. Just wanted to know I could come back if I want to— and if I win the argument with her.”

  Then they announced that the transport would be boarding, so I shook hands with Bill, lined up, and got aboard. It was a dull flight, so I spent most of it reading.

  Every so often I’d put the book down and work through the numbers again, trying to figure out what the devil she had in mind for me. My record was extremely good, I admitted, trying to avoid false modesty, so it might well be a promotion or a transfer to a special mission. NASA had three aerospace squadrons, which mainly flew missions from Earth up to orbit and back, and two orbital squadrons which flew Pigeons, between space stations, moonbases, and various things in orbit. I was qualified on Peregrines, Starbird IIs, Yankee Clippers, and Pigeons, so I could theoretically fly in any of those f
ive squadrons—there would be no good reason to move me over to either of the two engineering squadrons. Crossing off the First Aerospace, since this was a transfer, left me with restationing to Vandenberg (flying Yankee Clippers, out in the California desert) with the Second Aerospace; Malmstrom (Great Falls, Montana) with the Sixth Aerospace (and they were still flying the old Peregrine, which, lovely though it had been in its day, was now distinctly old); Armstrong (the Big Can-based L1 port that NASA had built to support other lunar activities) with the Fourth Orbital (Pigeons, reusable landers, and all kinds of odd flying hardware that went into orbital operations); or the Eighth Orbital, at New Tranquillity on the Moon. None of which had the climate advantages of Florida, and all of which would put me a lot farther from my family. This whole situation really didn’t look good.

  As we touched down in Houston and taxied to the gate, I realized I couldn’t remember a word of the book I had theoretically finished. I looked down to remind myself; glanced up and realized I didn’t know what the title was, two seconds later. Making sure I remembered my bag, I got off the plane and caught the shuttle to Johnson Spacecraft Center, which we usually just called JSC. I had about two minutes of the pleasantly cool, sunny day—the only time Houston is really bearable is in the autumn— and then I was being whisked to the Blue Pyramid, as everyone called it, the new headquarters building that had been put up only a few years ago. It hadn’t made JSC any less remote—it was still a good twenty-five miles from the city—or any more attractive, but I suppose it was easier to find in a small plane.

  When I got to Aunt Lori’s office, half an hour early, I was shown right in. That made the whole thing that much more mysterious. As soon as the door closed, she grinned and hugged me. I had to admit, that made me feel a lot better. She took a step back to look at me, and I returned the inspection.

  Her crewcut hair was iron-gray now, and there were lines around her eyes and mouth, but she still looked like she could take on any three average people half her age and beat the hell out of them, and her blue eyes had the same old sparkle. “You look well,” she said.

  “So do you.”

  “Have a seat. Let’s start with the social part of things and then I’ll tell you all about what a certain computer program told me.”

  I sat in one of the two chairs in front of her desk; she took the other and dragged it over to sit closer to me. “And how’s your mother, and Sig?”

  “Mom’s the same as always,” I said. “Still ten projects going all the time, still phoning from all over the world to make sure I’m eating right and ask when I’m going to find some nice girl who will help me make a grandmother of her. Which is a pretty strange conversation when she’s calling from the Amazon and I’m in orbit, but that’s Mom. And Sig . . . well, he’s the same, too.”

  Aunt Lori looked sympathetic. “Same old offer?”

  “Same old offer. Four times the money if I’ll fly one of his new Starliners.”

  “You could certainly afford a family on that kind of money,” she said, “and I don’t think there’s much question that the Starliners are going to be safer than most of what we fly—they’re drawing on more recent technology and they have the benefit of everyone else’s experience. Does the idea tempt you?”

  I shook my head. “No, ma’am. Not at all. It would be like giving up driving Indy cars to drive a city bus. They both take a lot of skill, but any ten-year-old can figure out which is more interesting.” I was exaggerating a little, but only a little. The Starliner was the commercial version of the Yankee Clipper, and its main cargo was not space crew or supplies but people. Consequently everything that could be done to make the ride smoother, gentler, and safer had been done; it just didn’t have the performance possibilities that the Clipper did.

  She chuckled. “Good boy. I thought I’d judged you right. And you’re happy right now in the First Aerospace? Your record there is as close to perfect as any I’ve seen, and Bill Amundsen thinks the world of you.”

  “I like it a lot,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind staying where I am for a long time.”

  “Good again,” she said. “Because I don’t want anyone to take the job I’m about to offer you unless it’s what you want to do, not just to avoid something you don’t like or get out of a boring post.” Her smile was getting broader, and she said, “Now, I said the computer told us something. We have an important opening coming up, for an important mission, and when we asked it to come up with the optimal pilot in the astronaut corps, it spat out your name.”

  I must have looked startled, because she held up a finger before I could speak and said, “Don’t be so surprised. You’re extremely well qualified, you’re having a brilliant career with us, and you should damn well know it. I want it firmly in your head that that’s why I’m about to suggest an opportunity. Furthermore, when we ran the top five suggestions by the mission commander, he specifically said that you were his favorite.” Her smile was downright impish; it was like she used to smile when she’d tease me back in high school, or when she dropped by to visit me at Colorado Springs.

  “Uh, can I know who the mission commander is?”

  “Sure,” she said. “It’s Walter Gander.”

  It was like an electric shock. Walter Gander was the commanding officer of the Seventh Interplanetary, and had been the first American to set foot on Phobos, Mars’s inner moon, on the Phobos One mission. I hadn’t even thought about the possibility of joining the Seventh; it was a small, elite unit that flew manned missions to Mars, and operations in Martian orbit. “He’s going himself?” I asked.

  “All our other squadron commanders do,” she pointed out. “And he’s been out there before, which is important, and most of all this is a vital mission. Besides, he remembers you from the class he taught when you were in training. He liked the way you weren’t afraid to try something you’d never done before. And he says you’ve got the most important quality—besides being a great pilot—that anyone can have for this one.”

  I looked puzzled. She held up a finger and said emphatically, “I mean discretion. You can keep your own counsel, and he’ll be able to talk freely to you and not worry about where it gets repeated. Which is going to be vital because you two will be the only Americans on this mission.” Now she was really beaming. “I’m not only excited for you, Jason, I’m practically jealous. If I could figure out a way to take the job myself, I would. What I mean is that you’re to be the pilot for the next Mars surface hab delivery. I trust you understand that everything from here on out is absolutely secret?”

  “Sure.” I was a little dazed. The crew and surface habitat deliveries were the basic missions to Crater Korolev on Mars. My job would be to fly myself, Gander, an engineer, and a team of scientists all the way to that crater, in the Martian arctic, where the larger Tiberian settlement—and hopefully the second copy of the Encyclopedia—lay frozen below meters of ice. “Why will we be the only Americans? I thought—”

  “Politics, of course,” she said. “We’ve always reserved operating American equipment for Americans—which means the Mars Five mission commander and the chief pilot have to be Americans. And on this mission, nobody’s willing to take an unequal share of seats. We needed full support from the other four members of the International Mars Consortium, so since the MarsHab takes a crew of ten, it’s two per agency. The Japanese, the Chinese, the Russians, and ESA.”

  “But—isn’t the engineer supposed to be an operating officer, too?”

  She nodded. “That’s our biggest compromise. The mission’s engineer—which means the first officer, of course, so she’ll outrank you—will be Olga Trigorin, a cosmonaut with a lot of flights under her belt. And she’ll be staying over, along with the scientists, so two years later when you catch your return flight on the cycler Collins, it will be just Walter and you from your expedition. She’s been training for this for more than a year, actually, because there are all kinds of things they’re going to need her for and she had to absorb a lot of special
information. It wasn’t easy getting her everything she needed, either, because we had to keep this mission secret up till now. In fact, the scientists are all being contacted today, too; only Olga and Walter knew this was coming.”

  “Knew what was—” I started to ask, and then I put it all together. A flight that Walter Gander was going to make himself. Extreme political pressure, so much that NASA was allowing a Mars mission to leave with a Russian first officer. There was only one thing that could have created this situation. “My God,” I said. “So they must have located the Encyclopedia and are ready to dig it up.”

  “Got it in one, Jason,” she said, smiling. “The permanent crew at Korolev has finished all the seismic and hydrographic work, and they know as much as can be known about where the objects in the settlement are and what they’re shaped like. And there happens to be one that’s the right size and shape, just about a kilometer away, two meters higher up in the ice—which really suggests that it arrived a while after the settlement was drowned, if that’s what happened to it. An unmanned cargo delivery is taking up the special tools, and then all we need is the archeology team itself before we start cutting into the ice.”