by Unknown
In this immensity there were radiating fractures, and crevasses, and rays of little craters like fumaroles, and the sharp rims of fresher craters not yet eroded by the constant sandpapering of micrometeorites. And all of this gnarled, ancient, brutally battered landscape was perceptibly rolling beneath the ship, its clarity undiffused by the lightest veil of atmosphere.
“You say something, cowboy?” Melinda’s voice seemed unnaturally loud in his ears.
“Uh, I was thinking, if I get braver, this’ll be easy.”
He hit the triggers and moved away from Starfire, flying slowly toward the rock. He had a momentary picture of himself in a flimsy hang glider, desperately attempting to land on a ledge on some awesome cliff in the Himalayas even as a steady downdraft kept pushing him away from his target.
It was not quite that tricky. They could inch their way in, stop, wait to see where the crater rims slid past, move in again, match speed, make their landing.
Tricky enough.
They were helped by the fact that Everest’s rotation was not a wholly unruly tumble but more like that of a wobbling top: the oblong body turned slowly on an axis through its center, but its two poles also described lazy circles about another imaginary axis in space. Near the poles the relative motion was at a minimum.
They headed for the north pole. Melinda flew past Travis, leading the way. Their jets gently, invisibly outgassed as they descended the curve in space; the miniature computers in the MMUs did most of the work, keeping the two astronauts slowly spiraling inward in a universe of spirals, closing on the nearer, redder hemisphere, its color that of coal dust mixed with rust.
With a final extra burst Melinda hit dirt, bounced soggily like a half-flat beach ball, then quickly stabilized herself on the surface. Her voice came gleefully over the radio. “That’s one small step for a woman.”
“Easy for you to say.” Travis, from Melinda’s perspective, was a white cross against the arcing stars. “How’m I doin’?”
“Twenty meters out—but it looks like you’re starting to lose it.” From where she stood, he was coming closer but sailing farther and farther to the side, like a whirling rock on a lengthening string. “Crank in a little Y.”
His gas jets puffed. “That should do it.”
“Yeah, not bad. Hold on, I want to get out of your way.” Moving with tiny bunny hops, she cautiously retreated from the pole. Like any mass the asteroid had its gravitational field, but Everest’s escape velocity was not much more than a meter per second, and too vigorous a step would have launched Melinda back into space. She turned and aimed the tiny camera at Travis, tracking him in. “Come on down. Gently, gently. Got the bunting ready?”
“A sec.” Travis tugged at a long thigh pocket and withdrew a shiny plastic cylinder. “Okay, say when.”
“Gently, Travis! Pay attention to—”
“Whoops!” Travis hit the surface hard. His knees bent and he fell forward; his knees unbent and he took off, rolling into a spectacular forward somersault with enough energy to send him careening into space feet first and flailing. Body memory came to his rescue—he’d been here before, too—so without taking time to calculate he squirted his MMU jets…and again…and touched surface at last. Gently.
“What’s your condition, EV-two?” Robin asked curtly.
“All in one piece, Commander.” Travis’s voice was an embarrassed growl. “The old buzzard has landed.”
“Copy.”
“You got out of that good,” Melinda said, “considering you got in it. Still holding on to the scarf trick?”
“It’s tied to me,” he said. “Like my head.”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
“Here goes…” Travis manipulated a catch on the side of the plastic cylinder. A twist of fabric shot out, opening like an umbrella to reveal a plastic American flag, bright red, white, and blue. Travis pulled the flag out and planted its thin wire “pole” into the pole of Everest; it stuck out sideways, stiff as starch. Then he fiddled with the catch again, and the flag of the United Nations similarly unfurled. He planted it beside Old Glory.
He stood back carefully and saluted. “Got that on video?”
“Yeah. And I got your nifty landing, too.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
That night most of the video channels on Earth carried the scene. In the warmth of their Clear Lake home, Jimmy and Eleanor Giles watched on National Public Video: “…earlier today, when astronauts Melinda Wooster and Travis Hill became the first humans to set foot on an asteroid.”
The recorded image frequently broke into senseless noise, but its elements were clear: the image of a space-suited astronaut, intensely white against the reddish black dust of the asteroid, saluting the flags of the United States and the United Nations. After a few seconds a second astronaut appeared, also saluting—Melinda had suspended her camera at eye level, letting it fall as slowly as a mote of dust in air, and jumped in to join Travis in the picture.
“Tomorrow Starfire’s crew begins a detailed geological and seismological survey of the asteroid. Reporting from Houston, Harriet Richards…”
Jimmy punched the remote, searching for a rerun on another channel. He and Eleanor were sitting at opposite ends of the floral-patterned Hide-a-Bed in the family room, watching the flat video screen mounted on the antique brick wall beside the fireplace. Meanwhile their daughters passed back and forth through the room, telephones clapped to their ears, eyeing the screen, whispering; “Oh, something on the video about them landing on that asteroid—anyway, I don’t think she really wants to see him after what he said about her to…”
Spitefully precise, Eleanor said, “The irrepressible Professor Hill. He seems to have succeeded in spite of you.” She did not look at her husband.
“I have nothing against Hill.” Jimmy sipped a cup of coffee. He was a coffee addict, but he was so wired from three nights of work that instant decaf was all he could risk.
“You’ve been so concerned—”
“Still am. There are inherent problems with this mission. Taylor wants desperately not to believe that.”
“And you so desperately do.” She eyed him. “And wouldn’t you just love to fly off to her rescue?”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I’m not blind, Jimmy. Or deaf.”
“I’m sure you’re not, Eleanor,” he said in a harsh whisper. He put down his coffee cup and glanced at the girls, who were talking, talking, oblivious, circling in the shadows of the room with phones growing out of their ears, their eyes transfixed by the video screen’s glow.
“Stop trying to baby Robin Braide. She certainly doesn’t need a father.” Eleanor stared at the screen, where Jimmy had found a video channel that was flashing back to comic relief: Travis, landing on the asteroid, doing his fantastical spatial ballet.
Jimmy stood. “Eleanor, let me tell you something, I’ve pulled a lot of duty as Capcom, and the first time I realized we were really in the space age was the first time I was communicating—supposed to be communicating—with a mission that was so far away, it took so long even at the speed of light just to talk to them, that we couldn’t make their decisions for them.” Like Eleanor, he was studying the screen, standing the sofa’s length away from her. “Rescue, for your information, is impossible. They come back on their own, or they don’t come back.”
She didn’t hesitate. “For which I suppose I should be thankful,” she said tartly.
“I’m going back to the office,” he said, and walked out.
14
“This is mission control, Houston, mission elapsed time three days twenty hours thirty minutes, and it is eight-thirty in the morning on Starfire, the crew has breakfasted and is going to work. After yesterday’s historic EVA by astronauts Melinda Wooster and Travis Hill, that team is preparing for a second EVA to visit the opposite end of the asteroid and take samples and place seismometers as they did yesterday. The crew has been calling the one end, which they par
tially explored yesterday, the red hemisphere and the one they will visit today the black hemisphere, which is a reference to the difference in spectral signatures from those surfaces…
“Also, we learned yesterday when Capcom queried the crew about their frequent references to ‘Everest,’ that that is the informal nickname the crew has adopted for the asteroid. Capcom was pleased to uplink the text of a faxgram a few minutes ago that we received here in Mission Control during the night. The fax was from Roy Rouse and Nora Kline at Mauna Kea observatory in Hawaii, the team of astronomers that first spotted the asteroid, and it read, ‘Today we have proposed to the International Astronomical Union that asteroid 2021 XA officially be named Everest. Godspeed to all aboard Starfire…’”
Jimmy listened to the PAO on his radio earphone. Far from JSC’s mission operations control room, Jimmy’s desk was a lonely workstation, even though the big, windowless, neon-lit room in which he sat was full of busy engineers. Haggard and tense, he had just learned that his only ally in the search for a software bug, the red-haired systems consultant Dolores Cruz, had been pressed into service on other matters by her contractor boss.
Well, he would do it himself if he had to. Jimmy had soon learned all he could by the quixotic method of eyeballing the written code; his instinct had quickly led him to suspect sensor input to the maneuvering system’s position estimator.
Numerous sensors reported the position, attitude, acceleration, and instantaneous velocity of the spacecraft; the temperatures and pressures in the fuel tanks and lines; the mass distribution of fuel and other components—all the variables. These sensors were redundant and smart, equipped to perform validity tests thousands of times each second—Do I make sense? Am I telling the truth?—but their reports had to be integrated before the main computers could use them to control the ship’s steering thrusters; the collation was done by the estimator.
Jimmy had been running simulations for the last two days, simulations that tested the estimator subroutines during main engine burns—straight burns at various throttle settings or burns with excess vibration and vibrational interference, every plausible set of conditions. He ran the same tests repeatedly and compared the runs side by side, searching for any small inconsistency in program performance from one test to the next.
In two days he had found no flaw in the estimator subroutines. If asked to justify his persistence he would have replied, a bit sourly, a bit less than seriously, with a quote from another of his favorite Catholic poets:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
He was prepared to take a very long time. Seriously. So it was with some surprise, even suspicion, that on the morning of the fourth day he greeted the first tangible hint of the nature of the problem.
When it appeared on his screen he pulled the radio out of his ear and picked up the phone. “Dolores? This is Jimmy Giles. I think I’ve found it. It looks a lot like a trap door.”
Cruz was with him in the time it took her to get across the campus. On the big graphics screen he put up the schematic of the maneuvering system; the smaller screen beside it displayed the alphanumerics of the code. He ran the key sections: simulated launch at high gees and sustained vibrational interference.
“In the first couple of dozen runs, nothing happened. In this one, this vent is getting a phony overpressure reading. It’s not the same vent that went out in the real incident, but that’s probably a random thing. If I keep running this, I’d probably get them all to fail.”
“But it closed again instantly,” Cruz said. She was frowning at the screen.
“In the simulation. The real valve pistons were sticky.”
“Where’s this so-called trap door?”
“An unassigned character combination in the estimator. There may be more than one. The clock stacks up the sensor readings to the estimator, and if you look here”—he scrolled the lines of code on the small screen and froze at a locus by now familiar to him—“the code specifies a character block for this sequence from the PE CCW that is an unassigned block for any other sequence.”
“If it comes in the wrong sequence, the estimator should ignore it.”
“Yes, but it doesn’t. It interprets it as overpressure from a different sensor and opens the vent.”
Cruz studied the characters on Jimmy’s screen. He watched her, waiting. As she concentrated, her freckles darkened and the wrinkles above her nose multiplied; the lacquered nail of her right hand’s middle finger tore at the flesh in the corner of her thumb. She was an attractive woman, Jimmy thought, but her hands were not her best feature.
“Okay, you’re right,” she said at last.
“But now you’re going to say that if the hardware is fixed, it doesn’t matter that much.”
“We’re not getting off that easy, I think. We have a rogue character block in the MS program. Okay, we can uplink a rewrite. But this is massively parallel hardware—massive opportunities for unpredictable decision paths. What if there are other unassigned blocks sitting there like hungry little parasites, not only in the MS estimator but in other key ganglions? We’re going to have to run through a lot of combinations and permutations.”
Jimmy nodded. “Support me in that, and we’ll get a team.”
“Oh, we’ll need one.”
15
“Mission control, Houston. Day four three hours twenty minutes. Hill and Wooster are back on board, and there will be a series of tests and experiments…”
Starfire, gleaming in the brightening sun, lay off the rolling flank of Everest like a whaler closing on its prey. A fiery harpoon streaked from the ship, plunging into the asteroid’s flank with a soundless flash.
On the flight-deck screen, a cone of shattered rock was seen to spew from the wound—a sheet of debris like a flower unfolding from Everest’s shadow into full sunlight, blowing away toward space in absolute silence.
Travis, watching over Robin’s shoulder, let out an enthusiastic yip.
Melinda was squeezed in behind Spin. “You know something, cowboy? You sound like you’re starting to have fun.”
“Ever since I was a little kid I loved to blow things up,” he replied.
“I know that feeling.” Linwood had emerged from the corridor behind them. “I got over it,” he said quietly.
Travis eyed him, but Linwood was studying the screen, neither expecting nor wanting a reply. Funny thing to say.
Melinda’s NAVCOM computer had the best graphics capability on the ship; there they did the first-approximation seismographic work. But NAVCOM was cramped, so most of Travis’s body was hanging into the central corridor as he pushed his head in beside Melinda’s, craning his neck at the screen.
The screen displayed a synthesized image of Everest as a white translucent solid, its interior cloudy in some regions, bright in others, with hazy dark inclusions deep in its core. The surface was scattered with half a dozen pinpricks of light: from the newest bright spot, waves of light still pulsed through the translucent body, bouncing off those pinpricks, interfering with one another, sharpening and refining the internal structure already evident.
“If we had one more shot…” Travis murmured.
“We’ve hit it from every orientation,” Melinda said irritably. “Six times. How much more seismic data do we need anyway?” Impatiently she wiggled the joy sticks on the console. The lumpy shape rolled in computer space.
“Go slow, go slow. Don’t get all nervous just when we’re about to learn somthin’.”
She scowled, took her hands off the joy sticks, and stuffed them into her armpits. This was something new: men who called her on her act had usually already lost their tempers.
Linwood had joined them in the corridor, coming from Travis’s geology laboratory below.
“Doc, you got a platinum ratio for the black hemisphere yet?”
Lin
wood looked faintly sheepish. “Perhaps I should go over this with you again, Professor Hill. I confess I could have contaminated the sample—unless a ratio almost three thousand percent higher seems plausible.”
“Wow.” Melinda forgot to sulk. “Can we take it with us?”
“I’ll bet the difference is real, Doc. There’s gotta be some damn interestin’ geology down inside there. Now just look at that,” said Travis, indicating a plane of differing textures that cleaved the breadth of the asteroid. “That’s beautiful. The ice and the carbon, divided as clear as can be. And these fissures from impact. Probably reheated the interior ice, and gas flowed—gave rise to these little chains of craters.”
“The sky was crowded a couple of billion years ago,” Melinda growled.
“Oh my yeah. Now what do you suppose those black places are?” Resonating waves from the last charge continued to sharpen the image of the black areas deep in the interior; they had become smaller, more focused.
“That says low density, maybe even hollow,” she replied shortly.
“Hollow, you say?” Travis rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Interestin’ to know what’s in ’em, wouldn’t you say?”
The sun was going down somewhere to the left of Taylor Stith’s picture window. “Let me get this straight,” Stith said. He was slouched in the chair behind his desk, peering at Jimmy Giles and Dolores Cruz across the joints of his knitted fingers, which were supporting his nose—a posture that rendered his voice less than clear. “It’s your contention that a programming error induced the MS one-twenty vent excursion. You concede that the mechanical repairs already effected make recurrence improbable, plus we’ve just uplinked a program rewrite to remove the glitch. But you think there are more glitches.”
“We think it’s likely, yes,” said Jimmy.