Sandy got five years, in Leavenworth.
On the first day of winter, he was taken out of the Washington federal courthouse in handcuffs and leg chains. Onlookers and former cell mates thought he looked unreasonably cheerful for a man facing hard time at Leavenworth.
He was to be transported to National Airport, and from there, flown to Kansas City, for further transfer on to Leavenworth.
The first vehicle was an eight-person van, divided into four cells, cages within a cage. Seating was minimal, but not brutal: a city-bus-style plastic seat, with minor alterations to allow the leg chain to be passed through a steel loop welded into the floor. There was enough room that he could stand and stretch.
He was allowed a slate with one book on it for entertainment, no Internet connection. On this day, he was the only passenger. The trip to National would take a half hour, since the federal marshals driving the van were not allowed to exceed the speed limit.
They were moving at precisely eight o’clock in the morning, the time chosen to avoid reporters. The first stop took place four minutes later, outside the old Smithsonian building. The van pulled to the side of the street, and one of the marshals in the front got out, came around to the back, and popped the door. Crow was standing on the curb, and climbed into the cell next to Sandy’s.
“I was wondering when you’d show up. I thought it’d be at National,” Sandy said. Gave him the toothy grin.
“Man, with that smirk, you gotta be even dumber than you look,” Crow said. “You’re on your way to Leavenworth. You know what that means? You’re gonna miss the best part of your life.”
“I’m thinking not,” Sandy said.
“Daddy can’t buy you outa this one, pal. Not gonna happen. And all your shipmates who think you saved their lives? Santeros dropped their petition in the wastebasket. She didn’t even bother to read it.”
Sandy looked down at his slate and flipped a page. Crow couldn’t quite see what he was reading. “Yeah, well. There’s always France. I think they’ll be willing to help out.” Sandy held up the slate: French for Americans.
“You gotta be kidding me.”
“Not at all. I need the refresher—it wasn’t my best subject at Harvard. I’ve always been an admirer of French civilization,” Sandy said. “The philosophy, the painting, the women, the food. The cheese, the mushrooms, the snails. You know. So I thought they’d really be the logical ones to lead the world into the next Renaissance.”
After a moment, Crow said, “You backed up the database, didn’t you? How’d you get it off the ship?”
“I’m gonna give it to the French. They’d ask me nicer.”
“The French? You motherfucker,” Crow said.
Sandy said, “You want to get out now? This is going to be a tiresome ride and I’ve got some serious reading to do.”
A long silence. Crow didn’t move. Then, “What do you want?”
“A pardon from the President,” Sandy said. “I’ll let her cover her ass. You know, ‘We let the trial go on, because we wanted to make a point about discipline. But there are extenuating circumstances, he’s very young and a little dumb, had a good service record’ . . . blah blah blah.”
“We can talk about that,” Crow said.
“And I want an apology. I thought about requiring her resignation, because, you know, she’s quite the serious asshole. But . . . I guess anyone else would be just as bad.”
“No way she would quit,” Crow said. “Or apologize.”
“You could be wrong about that. If word got out about the stakes involved—the whole future of American technological leadership—I believe the House and Senate might be willing to listen. They don’t like her much, anyway. I think she might resign rather than face impeachment.”
“Word wouldn’t get out,” Crow said. “You’ll be amazed at how secure our prison system can be, when it wants to be. When was the last time you heard a political statement from Ramon Roarty?” Roarty had conceived and planned the Houston Flash; he was now serving a life sentence at Leavenworth.
“I believe the French ambassador might be asking for permission to visit me in Leavenworth,” Sandy said. “To check on rumors of inhumane treatment of prisoners.”
“A request that would be denied.”
“Amidst vast embarrassment. To say nothing of rather pointed inquiries from the Chinese.” Sandy looked thoughtfully through the bars of his cage at the low ceiling of the van. “Maybe I should spread the wealth around. Let the French have the science stuff . . . they’re no good with tech anyway . . . and give the alien technology stuff . . . to who? The Brazilians? They’re really good with machinery.”
For the first time in their entire acquaintance, Sandy saw a hint of surprise in Crow’s eyes. “Now you are fucking with me. It’s not the database? You’ve got a QSU?”
Sandy picked up the slate. “Hmmm, I need to work on my French for ‘fuck.’ That’ll be important,” he muttered. He read something on the slate. “And it’s a little complicated. It’d be embarrassing to use the wrong version of the word. The French are so . . . intricate . . . in their sexual ways, don’t you think?”
Another long silence, then, “I can get you the pardon.”
“And the apology . . .”
“We’ll work out something,” Crow said.
“I have to insist on the apology,” Sandy said. “A really abject one. Handwritten by herself. Signed. I’ll promise to hold it privately until she’s out of office. When she’s out, though, I’m gonna use my grandpa’s money to buy a mansion at Zuma Beach and I’ll put the apology on the wall of the entrance hall. Gonna be so cool. But the pardon has to be public. Like right now.”
“We’ll work it out,” Crow said again. “So. What did you do?”
“I won’t give you the precise details until I’m walking around free,” Sandy said.
“Just tell me. Or I’m getting out and the van can go on to Leavenworth. It’s not the day camp you seem to imagine it is.”
Sandy said, “You remember when I was fabbing the burn box and I had to do those measurements of the QSUs? Well, while Joe was busy building the circuits, I printed up a couple copies of the QSUs. I had my Red photos with perfect color-matching, and the precise scales, and when I finished . . . I mean, they were perfect. Then, when I was fitting the QSUs into the burn box, I switched a couple of them.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“Because everybody was so worried about what would happen if the Chinese took the ship. It was an obvious possibility, so . . . why not? If everything worked out, I’d just retrieve them and turn them over to you.”
“How’d you get them off the ship?”
“In my hand-camera case. Took the camera out, put the QSUs inside, sealed it up . . . and when we evacuated the Chinese from the Odyssey, took a minute to stick it on the far side of the ship with its Post-it pads. I was worried about the battery—that the lack of warmth would kill it. But then I remembered about the radiators. They put enough heat on parts of the hull that the hull actually was warmish, and that’s all I needed. With just a little warmth seeping into the camera case, the battery would last for five years. When we got back . . .”
“You used your remote to unstick it. The camera case is in orbit.”
“Yup. Saw it pop off the hull myself. It’ll take you about a hundred years to find it, with all the other shit that’s still floating around up there. What I’ll keep to myself, until I get the apology, is exactly what time I let that puppy go. Got it right down to the tenth of a second. With that information, you could find it in an hour.”
“Why’d you wait so long to tell me? Why this whole charade?”
“I think we needed it,” Sandy said. “I think we needed the whole trial, all the theatrics, all the bullshit about doing research on the readers, all the sincerity, to convince the Chinese that we really d
idn’t have anything, other than the raw science from the I/O. And that’s mostly theory—that’s gonna get out no matter what we do. Probably printed in Nature & Science. In fact, when I thought about it, publishing the science, even the little bit that we have, would set off a lot of research commotion, which would cover up the fact that we have all of it. For a while, anyway.”
Crow nodded and said, “You’re right. About all of it.” He stood up, climbed out of the van, and said to the marshals, who were waiting on the sidewalk, “Let him out.”
As the marshals came around, Sandy said, “You knew I’d been up to something. Why?”
“’Cause you once told me that you’d not only do what we want, you’d do what we need,” Crow said. “I believed you. Plus, of course, that shit-eating grin that would pop onto your face, from time to time, during the trial. Santeros actually spotted it.”
“Huh. Gotta work on that,” Sandy said. “Uh, why are the marshals just . . . letting me go?”
“They’re not exactly marshal-type marshals, if you take my meaning.”
“Did you ever catch your spy?”
“Can’t talk about that.”
“Did you ever figure out how he was communicating with the Chinese?”
“No, never did.”
“I read that Elroy Gorey died when the GPS went crazy on a twenty-wheeler, swerved across the road and killed him.”
“A tragedy,” Crow said. “We all felt terrible.” Neither his voice nor his face showed the slightest inflection.
The marshals freed him and Sandy climbed out of the van. Crow handed him an envelope. On the outside it said simply: “The White House.”
“What’s this?”
“The pardon,” Crow said. “I’ll work on the apology. Listen, my car’s right around the corner. You need a lift?”
EPILOGUE
2179
DEEP SPACE
The sun was the most brilliant star in the sky, but that was all that distinguished it from other stars. The white-hot pinprick shed barely as much light as the quarter moon did on Earth, three thousand AU away. It did little to illuminate the ship gliding through the inner Oort cloud.
Earth’s first truly deep space mission had already satisfied two of its three mission objectives. The run out to the Oort cloud was the final field test of the technology critical to the interstellar vessel currently under construction in high Earth orbit. Long-duration antimatter containment and propulsion was a proven reality, and deep-space, self-contained life support a proven technology.
The ship’s second objective had been to sample several primordial Oort cloud objects, comets yet to be born. It was science’s first chance to study truly pristine material from the formation of the solar system and an excellent trial run for the remote-sensing and physical investigation procedures that would be integral to the interstellar ship’s research.
The ship closed on its final objective.
Two service modules jetted out from the ship’s air lock. Ever so carefully, mindful of four billion pairs of watching eyes back on Earth, they matched velocities with a vaguely egg-shaped module of antique design, human sized, encrusted with insectile appendages, ports, windows, and cameras. The main port was cracked. Crushed storage lockers and canisters surrounded the base of the egg.
There was a small hole in the egg’s shell.
The two modern modules linked to the antique’s grappling rings. Ever so gently, they shepherded it into the ship’s air lock.
The lock closed.
The ship rotated until its nose pointed toward the sun.
Antimatter engines flared, immeasurably brighter than the distant pinpoint sun. In two years, the crew would be back on Earth, accompanied by Dr. Rebecca Johansson, the first voyager and the first casualty of the interstellar age, who was finally returning home.
AUTHORS’ NOTE: THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE STORY
Dear Reader:
DON’T read this until you’ve read the novel, because you’ll get a whole bunch of spoilers. Some people are fine with that. We know people who read the ends of mysteries first so they can find out whodunit and then enjoy the run-up. We’re just warning you.
The science fiction author Greg Benford talks about “wantum mechanics.” It’s the totally made-up non-science that saves the crew in the last dozen minutes of a bad Star Trek episode. “Captain, if we invert the polarity of the phasers and couple them to the warp drive, we can produce a beam of the never-before-heard-of unbelievablon particles and render the enemy’s fleet helpless.”
That’s one kind of thrill ride, and it’s fun. But we wanted to write the kind of high-tech, hard-science thriller where you can’t just make up stuff to solve your problem—where you have to deal with the real lemons that life hands you, to make your lemonade.
Such a problem is right where we started. One of us (John) had this idea for a novel. To give the story the right pacing, it needed spaceship technology that wouldn’t take decades to build and could get to Saturn in less than six months. Even setting the story five decades from now, he didn’t know how to do that without just making stuff up—wantum mechanics. So he reached out to the other of us and said, “Ctein, can you figure out how to make this work, because if you can, we might have ourselves a novel.”
Cut to the finale. He did, and we did, and you just read it.
—
Here’s some of the science behind the story:
The Big Problem is that space travel is hard. “Rocket science” became synonymous with “really hard” for good reasons. Getting anywhere fast is really, really hard. We couldn’t come up with any way to meet the timetable we wanted with present-day technology, so the story is set half a century from now.
It is, in fact (well, in fiction) a fairly boring half century. For the sake of our story we decided that space travel won’t make much more progress in the next four or five decades than it has in the last four or five. Science fiction is a game of what-if, not accurately predicting the future.
Still, if you’d told someone back in 1969, at the time of the first moon landing, that nearly half a century later humans wouldn’t be doing anything outside of low Earth orbit, not even going back to the moon, they’d have thought you were crazy. It certainly wasn’t what your typical science fiction author imagined for the next fifty years. Depressing as the thought is, our scenario may not be as implausible as we’d like to believe.
With fifty years’ worth of steady and predictable technological advancements, we could pull off the science. That still doesn’t make space travel easy. Space travel’s hard because you need high velocities to get anywhere fast, and it’s really hard to get high velocities. It takes appalling amounts of energy.
Typical solar system travel times are usually measured in years. The simplest low-velocity, long-duration trip from Earth to Saturn takes about seven years. It’s called a “Hohmann transfer” and you can read about it in Wikipedia. That’s way too slow for our story. Even then, it takes about as much additional velocity—seven kilometers per second (km/s)—to get yourself from high Earth orbit onto a trajectory that reaches Saturn, as it does to get into Earth orbit in the first place.
Once you get to Saturn, you’ll need more delta-vee (rocket scientist shorthand for the change in velocity that you’re making) to kill some of your initial velocity, so you’ll put yourself in orbit about Saturn instead of flying on past. Then you’ll need similar amounts of delta-vee to get you home again, and back into Earth orbit. That’s why almost all the robotic probes we’ve sent out have been one-way missions; returning home means you need a lot more delta-vee at your disposal.
You might be thinking, well what’s so tough about that? If it takes a total of twice as much velocity to get you to Saturn as it does to get into Earth orbit, just make the rocket twice as big. Okay, maybe three times as big to account for getting into orbit around Saturn. And the
same amount to get you back again. That doesn’t seem that hard.
Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. Now we’re into proper rocket science, something called the “Tsiolkovsky rocket equation.” Don’t worry, no math here; you can get that from Wikipedia. The rocket equation ties together three things: the amount of delta-vee you want, the exhaust velocity of your rocket, and the mass ratio of your rocket.
What’s “mass ratio”? That’s just the ratio of what your rocket weighs fully loaded with reaction mass, divided by what it weighs when you’ve used up all that mass. That empty (or “dry”) weight is everything that isn’t fuel; it includes the empty tanks that held the fuel.
Exhaust velocity is the magic number. As long as the total delta-vee you want is less than your exhaust velocity, the amount of reaction mass you need isn’t too bad. For example, a rocket that burns oxygen and hydrogen, one of the best chemical fuels you can use, has an exhaust velocity around 4 km/s. If you want to get a delta-vee of 2 km/s, the rocket equation says you need a mass ratio of about 1.7. That means you need to carry 0.7 tons of fuel for every ton of dry rocket you’re trying to launch. If you want a delta-vee of 4 km/s, the ratio goes up to 2.7—1.7 tons of fuel for every ton of dry rocket. That’s not hard to build.
If you want more velocity than that, it starts to get ugly quickly. Suppose you want a delta-vee of 8 km/s, enough to get you into Earth orbit? (In reality, it’s a little harder than that, but we’re simplifying for the sake of discussion.) You can think of that as being like getting 4 km/s twice. But, for that first 4 km/s, you’re trying to push a rocket that is 2.7 times bigger, because it has to be carrying all that fuel to get the second 4 km/s. Your mass ratio winds up about 7.5. Only 13 percent of your ship is actually ship; 87 percent is fuel that you burn up.
It’s awfully hard to build a rocket strong enough to survive flight that is 87 percent fuel. Tanks can only be made so lightweight, and there has to be a useful payload, like people or instruments. It’s right on the edge of what our engineering is capable of.
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