“So the permanent crew will just leave it in place till we get there?” I asked. “Seems kind of . . .”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s boring and frustrating for them,” Lori said with a shrug. “But that’s the way it is with archeology—if you don’t want to risk losing it the moment you find it. Plan before you dig, be ready to preserve what comes up, and always have an expert present so that if it crumbles or breaks there’s at least somebody who knew what they were looking at and might remember something important. That has been the basic principle for earth archeology since the early 1900s.” Her eyes got a little far away, and she added, “And if we’d stuck to that principle for Tiberian artifacts, you might have been having this conversation with your father, you know. It’s our last shot at the Encyclopedia, Jason, so we’re taking no chances. The scientists include some Mars veterans, and people with years of accumulated Moon time at the south pole dig, so you’re definitely going to feel like the junior guy on the crew. But you’re a first-rate pilot, Walter wants you, and you have my complete confidence.
“If you want the job, I should also tell you that after you get to Mars, although your orders give you the right to come back at the next opposition, NASA will hope you won’t come back—it costs a lot to get anyone there, and once you have some Mars experience they’d rather you stayed, because you’ll be valuable there. Now—I’m assuming you’ll accept?”
I could see that she was teasing, and for once I didn’t mind a bit. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I accept. Where do I report and when?”
“First you’ll need to get moved,” she said. “The Seventh is headquartered right here at JSC, and transfer orders are going out as soon as I give my secretary the go-ahead. In anticipation of your accepting, I’ve arranged for someone to show you some furnished apartments over in Nassau Bay, and then whenever you find something you can stand, you can go back, spend two days packing, and get back here. You’ll begin training with Olga and Walter about a week from now. And of course you depart Earth five months before the next opposition, which means you’ll be leaving Earth orbit in mid-April of 2033. As of right now, Jason, you’re a hundred forty-four days from leaving for Mars.”
She stood up, indicating that the interview was over, and grinned. “Jason, the rest of this conversation is with Aunt Lori, not Chief Kirsten. All I can say is, you lucky bastard. And that’s what a lot of people will say, you know. I hate to bring it up, but when the Public Affairs Officer for this found out that you headed the list, he was beside himself with glee.”
“I figured,” I said. “It’s all right. I certainly don’t mind being Chris Terence’s son, and I don’t think you’d give this job to an idiot based on his ancestry. The reporters are a little aggravating to deal with, though.”
“Another way you’re a lucky bastard,” she said. “In a hundred forty-four days, you’ll be going millions of miles away from the press.”
* * * *
The third furnished apartment they showed me looked all right; it wasn’t a big problem because nobody lived with me and I had no pets, so I took the first clean and decent-looking furnished place that would let me rent month-to-month and was close enough to work. I gave my mother in D.C. a call to let her know that I had been transferred and would have a new address soon.
“You know, Jason, you’re really more like your father all the time. You don’t even complain about being yanked from one place to another. I think you even enjoy it.”
“I do like a change of scene,” I said, noncommittally. We had this conversation every time I was transferred.
“Well, you’re never anywhere long enough to meet anyone, or put down any roots,” she said. “I don’t think that can be good for you.”
I heard Sig in the background saying, “Amber, will you leave the poor kid alone, he’s grown up for God’s sake,” and stifled a laugh as I sat down on the windowsill and looked out over the town. I’d never quite figured out how a guy so different from me had always been able to understand what I needed, but as the years went by I became more and more grateful that Sig had been there when I was a teenager.
“Anyway,” she said, “I hope you found a place with decent decor, and not in a high-crime area.”
“It’s sort of brown-orange,” I said. “JSC isn’t anywhere near the city, and even if it were, there aren’t really any high-crime areas anymore.”
“You still don’t have to live near them,” she said, firmly. We talked for a while about trivial things. She and Sig were coming down to visit Lori next month, and now they would have an excuse to see me as well. Sig’s niece had graduated from medical school and was thinking of taking a specialty in microgravity medicine. It was raining more than usual in Washington.
After we said good-bye and hung up, I found myself wandering through the furnished apartment, idly getting used to what views there were, and thinking about the conversation. Older people like my mother still remembered times when there were large parts of every big city where you couldn’t go after dark. There were still places I wasn’t crazy about, but things were different now; the prisons were slowly emptying.
It wasn’t that people were nicer; there were as many jerks as ever, but now they were all jerks with jobs, generally good jobs, which meant they had homes and cars and something to lose, and so they behaved themselves. The world had changed a lot on its way from the disaster on the Moon to this moment, when we were going to take our second chance. I sat in the darkening living room, looking out over the highway full of headlights shooting by, and thought about what had made the changes. It seemed strange that although the world had changed so thoroughly, bringing me to this critical moment in human history, what I remembered most vividly were the things anyone does, the normal changes in my life, growing up and growing older.
It took me a year or so, after I got back from the ShareSpace trip, to really accept and recover from my father’s death. During that year, though I didn’t pay much attention to it, numerous politicians and pundits made a lot of speeches, did a lot of fingerpointing, and generally demanded that someone do something. Only two things were clear: the first was that space flight was the key if we were to do anything at all about the loss of the vast archive that was now scattered in useless bits of metal and silicon across the far side of the Moon. The second was that now that we knew it existed, we had to have that archive. Materials found at the Tiberian base at the lunar south pole indicated that they had been literally centuries ahead of us in materials science; almost everything of theirs, from the four-story-tall lander to their hammers and screwdrivers, was made of stuff stronger, lighter, and more durable than anything we knew how to make. Devices in their small infirmary were quite often compact efficient versions of what we were just barely managing to make at all in our laboratories. The optical computer (unfortunately quite inert) in the lander, and the optical information storage device that had been the Encyclopedia, clearly treated problems that we were only just learning to phrase, let alone to solve, as bits of routine engineering. And of course, as Chris and Xiao Be had noted, the propulsion system that had gotten the Encyclopedia here in a matter of a few decades (if the message was to be believed) was only about half the size of an ordinary garbage can, and had no apparent fuel source at all. By comparison, to get a package of the same mass to Alpha Centauri in one thousand years, we would have had to use the combined thrust of about 100,000 Energiyas, the biggest rocket then in use.
In a way the match was perfect; they were just far enough ahead of us (or had been at the time they stopped visiting) so that we could understand the significance of what they did and realize how much power and potential was in their technology, but not so far ahead that we couldn’t eventually understand it—if we could get the Encyclopedia. Here was the chance to advance every field of natural science by centuries; here was the chance, for the first time, to compare humanity’s art, religion, history, and everything else with that of another species, to gain some insight into what might be uni
que to our species and what might be common to all intelligence.
Or rather, here had been the chance. With the lunar Encyclopedia smashed to bits, there was only one choice now—get to Mars, get the other one, and do it right this time.
The big five space programs had suddenly had plenty of resources, but they had needed every bit of them. There were a dozen things to do right away: begin preparing for the eventual voyages to Phobos and Crater Korolev, to try to retrieve whatever might be there; return to the Tiberian moonbase and conduct history’s most important archeological dig, a quarter of a million miles away, in hard vacuum, in a place where the sun hadn’t shone in billions of years; take hundreds of engineers’ daydreams out of the technical literature and turn them into reality; educate the people who could do these things, and get them there.
That last part had been the key. We had to educate more people, better, in less time than ever before, because we needed millions of brilliant and well-trained scientists and engineers for every one of those gigantic tasks. We couldn’t even begin until we got every good brain we could find trained as well as it could be.
The first way that I noticed it was two years after the accident, when people with Ph.D.s started turning up to give math tests to my ninth grade class—and if you did well, suddenly you had a scholarship to a superb school where those Ph.D.s would be your teachers. I was relieved, though Sig was disappointed, when I didn’t turn out to be quite that brilliant.
It didn’t matter anyway, because money and talent were pouring into all the schools, at all levels. For a while, good teachers were so much in demand that many of them were working twelve-hour days and pulling down more pay than corporate middle managers. They had a volunteer program going so that a lot of engineers and professors were “retiring” into teaching in the public schools, at increased pay.
By the time I was in college, the acceleration of education had meant huge expansions of opportunity, so much that even though there were four times as many engineers and scientists as there had been in 2010, the shortage was worse than ever. If you passed a few science classes you could have corporate recruiters beating down your door by the end of your sophomore year—or at least you could if you were at a civilian school. I’d chosen to go to the Air Force Academy.
And it wasn’t just the job market that was changing. After decades in which every big project took much longer and cost much more, suddenly things were getting done ahead of time and under budget. Suborbital airliners were being talked about when I was a freshman, but I flew home for Christmas my senior year in one. Six years after the first maglev line between Los Angeles and San Jose, there were 15,000 miles of maglev track in the United States alone. One year after the Japanese pilot project for growing wood into preformed shapes in a tank, Mitsui was shipping whole prefab houses everywhere on the globe. Ocean-floating aquafarms were abolishing hunger; doctors had cured AIDS and Alzheimer’s and were talking about human life extension to 150 years.
And all of this was caused merely by the overflow—if you need to recruit and train a thousand superb people, in any field, the best way to do it is to recruit and train a million people, and then pick the best tenth of a percent. Thus to get enough of the very best, the University Space Research Associates had had to produce many times that number of people who were “merely” excellent, and the release of so much highly trained talent into the world had done the rest.
But even while global knowledge and production were taking a leap forward on a scale not seen since the Renaissance, with the news full of one triumph after another, it had all been overshadowed by the archeological dig at the lunar south pole.
That was the hard one to believe. It didn’t seem that long since my dad and Xiao Be were going to be the seventeenth and eighteenth people to walk on the Moon, but now, in 2032, the Moon’s South Pole Station was a small town with over 200 quasi-permanent residents. A couple of the archaeologists and the base operations people had been residents of the Moon for more than five continuous years, and last year a baby girl had been born there.
I got up and got myself a diet Coke from the fridge, drinking it straight from the bottle as I watched the dark settle over the neighborhood and the electric lights blaze to life. I had been in seventh grade at the time of the accident. There had been a swift redesign and replanning, since now they knew that they would have to spend hundreds of person-years studying that site. When I graduated from high school, the first crews to stay over on the Moon, not going back on the same ship that brought them, had been there for just a few weeks, and unmanned probes and supply ships had been going out to Mars on the last few oppositions, a steady stream of material going out and data coming back for the explorers to follow.
During summer training after my junior year at Colorado Springs, they had suddenly loaded us all onto buses to go watch a big-screen TV. We had watched Walter Gander—the man who would now be my commanding officer, I realized, and it still astonished me—step off the Phobos One landing craft, a slightly modified Pigeon the cycler Aldrin had carried with them, and carefully plant his boots on the dusty face of the new world. Looking up at the vast ruddy bulk of Mars hanging over his head, he said, “We have come this far, and we’re here to stay. And—” suddenly his voice grew emphatic, no longer delivering a dignified public address, but declaring what he really meant “—and next time it won’t be another fifty years! Worlds of thanks to Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders, who paved the way for Neil, Buzz, Mike, and all.” NASA had timed the landing carefully; it was December 25, 2018, fifty years to the day since Apollo 8 first reached the Moon.
What we knew about the Tiberians had also increased enormously, but it had a tendency to change drastically every couple of years. My last year at the Air Force Academy, there had been a no-credit class, taught by a history prof who had just returned from the dig on the Moon. The thinking at the time, based on the shelters and equipment they had found, was that the Tiberians had established their main base on Phobos and then set up a secondary base on the Moon. The thousands of broken pieces of everything that the Gander expedition had found all over Phobos tended to confirm this; possibly their base there had exploded, leaving the forward team on the Moon stranded. But then why was there no evidence of an explosion or meteor strike anywhere near their cave habitat on Phobos? And why was there no one inside? Had they all been working at a power plant on the other side of Phobos when the explosion happened? Then why were there no corpses or body parts among the debris? And hadn’t anyone been able to abort to Crater Korolev, or anyone from Korolev been able to come up and help?
Whatever stopped the Tiberian base on Phobos from relieving their base on the Moon, it must have happened early on, the archaeologists said, because the lunar base seemed half-finished and cobbled together, as if the Tiberians had had to improvise without any external support. Their mission had come to an ignominious end there at the lunar south pole. Their lander, with its strange mixture of aerostatic, aerodynamic, and rocket flight, was clearly capable of reaching the Earth, and the message seemed to say they had done so but then left. Why had they not returned to a world where at least they could breathe? Moreover, the base seemed never to have been fully staffed, because there were twice as many beds as bodies.
The way they had died was a mystery as well. It looked as if they had starved, since the little automatic farm was one of the few Tiberian devices there that didn’t seem to have been abandoned in working order. And why had they brought what appeared to be young children with them—in such great numbers? Had they intended to colonize the Earth? “The great mystery,” the professor had said with a flourish, “is why, with a working spacecraft and the Earth’s surface just hours away, they didn’t fly down and collect more than enough to feed themselves—or better still, move to our planet. With their technical superiority over us, given that dust on the shelter surfaces tends to indicate a date around 7000 B.C., which is confirmed by the counter in the Message itself, they could have been
our rulers and masters. Why they chose not to ... or could not . . . well, for the answer to that, we may very well have to wait until we get a look at Crater Korolev, or perhaps something will turn up in the analysis of the debris from Phobos that will be coming back on the special cargo return craft.”
I was in flight training in January of 2021 when the Two Phobos expedition landed and set up Phobos Base. A lot of us stayed up late, in an all-night coffeehouse in town, to watch the landing, but due to problems with the transmission, they couldn’t show us much of it and we had to be content with interviews with all sorts of people telling us that this was important. We all noticed that the lunar archaeologists were already complaining that not enough archaeologists were getting to Phobos; it seems to be an early part of pilot training to deal with the complaints of mission specialists. No doubt they feel the same about us.
Meanwhile, everything I had heard at the lecture two years before had fallen into question. Xenobiologists—a field that had come into existence in four years flat and now boasted four monthly journals—had managed to establish that the tissues of all the dead Tiberians had various kinds of damage brought on by the way their immune systems reacted to long-term exposure to Earth proteins, so they not only had to have been to the Earth, they had to have spent years here eating the food. Now the idea was that the Moon was some kind of refugee camp or quarantine area for sick Tiberians being rescued from a failed Earth colony. But then why hadn’t they finished the job? And how could a starfaring race not have a big enough ship to just take everyone off the Earth and put them into shipboard quarantine?
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