The Orion Protocol

by Gary Tigerman

  “Minus ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . .”

  Berenkov and the others around him now donned dark glasses, as the project director’s voice came over the loudspeaker.

  “Project Orion. Initiating Primary Alpha Test.”

  In an underground lead-lined core, a controlled nuclear explosion telegraphed a low rumble through the floor and then the fission flash of a hundred Hiroshimas was directed and transmuted through the multistory titanium weapon just fifty yards away.

  If Berenkov had looked up, he would have seen how the entire airspace up and out through the open dome had now been replaced by a spectacular rod of laser light, one hundred feet in diameter and brighter than the sun.

  How quiet it is, Berenkov thought, fighting the urge to steal a peek at the blinding energy column thrusting out into space, its giga-trillions of electrons per second streaming in lockstep alignment.

  “Sixty percent and stable . . .”

  But the senior scientist stayed riveted to the fluctuating readings on his monitor. Everything was remaining within parameters, but his eyes played tricks on him and he found himself hallucinating tiny alarming changes. It was excruciating.

  “We are at seventy-five percent and stable . . .”

  He began to hear excited yelps and cheers, which he presumed were coming from the Americans on the Atlantis and the cosmonauts and Chinese taiko-nauts on board Space Station Alpha.

  So far, so good.

  On the monitor, Berenkov could see how the laser looked from orbit; this magnificent beacon beaming out from the Earth, all the way out as far the eye could see into the solar system.

  If some extraterrestrial beings were watching this event, what would they make of it? he wondered. An impressive human achievement? A bold statement of an emerging species arriving at a new threshold of knowledge? A wake-up call?

  “We are at nominal target volume, ninety percent and stable . . .”

  Each nanosecond seemed like an hour of doubt and fear, the smell of his own suppressed terror sweating through Berenkov’s undershirt. If something went bad at this point it would likely happen far too fast to retrieve it. The Russian scientist realized that the last thing he ever saw in this lifetime might be a tiny little sine-wave spike on his nice new American PC.

  “Sixty seconds at ninety percent and stable . . .”

  But it was holding. Orion was holding.

  Berenkov heard the exclamations of his colleagues as the reality of their achievement began to sink in.

  “Two minutes at ninety percent and stable. Going to one hundred percent . . .”

  If focused on the Moon, the Orion laser weapon would melt the surface silica into molten glass, burning a hole the size of a football field a half-mile deep. If it targeted the Clark Belt, where the world’s key military and civilian satellites orbited, a nation’s communications could be vaporized in half a heartbeat.

  “We are at one hundred percent and holding.”

  Project Orion was working.

  Berenkov thanked God, in whom he did not believe, and then shivered involuntarily as he imagined this same awesome power directed downward from space at the great cities of the Earth. The potential for holocaust that this would add to mankind’s already planet-wasting nuclear and biological arsenals was suddenly palpable.

  “Project Orion. Preshutdown and counting ten—nine—eight—seven—six—five—four . . .”

  And then it was over.

  The dazzling rod of light disappeared, leaving bars of after-colors swimming on everyone’s retinas. Cheers of triumph and waves of applause erupted around the room. Berenkov blinked and took off his cheap sunglasses. Looking down at his hands, he found them slick with sweat. The hair on his arms and on the back of his neck was sticking up.

  Well, he thought, we lived. That was something.

  As loudspeaker voices chanted through the postshutdown procedures, a party atmosphere began to blossom. On the observation deck, the generals, politicians, and businessmen were popping open French champagne. Everywhere people hugged one another, crying and laughing in relief.

  Orion was a success. A resounding success.

  Berenkov blinked and then abandoned his workstation, his clipboard still clenched unconsciously in his hand. He could feel colleagues clapping him on the back, pressing little paper cups of export-quality vodka into his hand, but he waved them off.

  “Sergei Sergeivich!”

  “Aw, Mr. Grumpy. You must drink a toast!”

  Pushing his way through the knots of celebration, Berenkov lurched out of the control room and down the empty linoleum-covered corridor.

  The implications of his work, the potential nightmare of horrific applications, hadn’t really hit him full force until this moment. His mind flashed to the ‘40’s, to Fermi and Oppenheimer and all the elite minds weaponizing the physics of fission; what ambivalence they had felt even in a time of world war.

  Orion had begun long before the end of the Cold War and had continued now for decades since the Wall had come down, and the Americans had become our partners and allies. So who, then, was the enemy? Who except we ourselves and our will to destroy one another? Who, now that we are in bed with the enemy, is the enemy?

  Stumbling into the chill and ill-kept men’s room, Dr. Sergei Sergeivich Berenkov was overwhelmed with dread and an inexpressible fear for the future. Losing his grip on the clipboard holding the day’s test protocols, he heard it clatter to the floor.

  We are all insane, he thought. We are . . . insane.

  The Cyrillic letters spelling out PROJECT ORION fell facedown into a small unmopped puddle of water, but he didn’t notice and would not have cared.

  Mr. Grumpy was too busy at the washstand, throwing up.

  16

  January 31/PBS Studios/Washington, D.C.

  “We are alive in a new Golden Age of Astronomy.” Angela could hear her own prerecorded voice-over as she stepped up to a yellow tape mark on the floor of the PBS soundstage.

  “In the Orion Nebula, thanks to the Hubble Telescope, mankind can now watch stars being born for the first time in history.”

  Behind her a large Sony monitor displayed an opening Science Horizon montage of spectacular space images gathered from a host of NASA instruments.

  “And with this first look at a ‘cosmic nursery’ comes a new view of Creation as well. Not as something long finished and slowly dying, but as a glorious, evolving work-in-progress.”

  A stylist knocked down the shine on Angela’s nose and forehead with a Victoria Vogue sponge. Behind the glass in the producer’s booth, Miriam made eye contact and hit the talk-back button.

  “Three minutes, kiddo.”

  Angela nodded. Standing in a tight pool of light, she closed her eyes and let go of everything she could do nothing more about today, particularly everything having to do with their would-be whistle-blower, Deep Cosmo.

  During the day, calls to all the courier services used by both PBS and NASA had come up with zilch in tracking the package back to its source. Neither day-shift security nor the mail-room people had been any help, either. But this was just the beginning and she and Miriam had an overall battle plan.

  A plan that they were initiating tonight.

  Up in the producer’s booth where Miriam called the shots for three cameras, the hard decisions in terms of the show had already been made, but the booth was where it all came together. It was also ground zero whenever things went to shit, as they were always threatening to do, though Miriam handled the pressure with an enviable smart-ass aplomb.

  “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,” she whispered breathily into the talk-back mike, cracking up Angela, the crew around her, and everyone wearing headsets on the soundstage floor. Broadcast production was en eccentric enterprise about which Hunter Thompson’s smart remarks on the ‘60’s New Journalism were often apropos.

  “Two minutes, everybody.”

  Miriam buzzed the stage manager.

>   “Billy? Let’s have places, please. Where’s Eklund?”

  “On his way. I called Goddard and they said he left an hour ago.”

  “Okay, if he’s not here by break time we go to plan B.” Miriam was already marking up her copy of the script with potential revisions.

  “Uh, what plan B?”

  “I’m workin’ on it. Places.”

  On the monitors, Angela’s recorded voice-over continued.

  “In Upsilon Andromedae and scores of other places in our own galaxy we are also seeing the first thrilling proof of planets circling sunlike stars. Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk, was burned at the stake four hundred years ago for suggesting that the cosmos was home to thousands of Earths. Perhaps Father Bruno deserves an apology.”

  Miriam looked up from her rewrites as Professor Stephen Weintraub and the famed Nobelist Dr. Paula Winnick were escorted from the backstage makeup room and settled into chairs on the raised platform of the set. As always, she thought the septuagenarian Dr. Winnick had a fascinating presence.

  What an incredible woman, she thought.

  Wearing a Chanel suit and radiating an effortless, exuberant intelligence, Winnick was by far the most publicly recognized name in American space science after Einstein and Carl Sagan. Now that she had outlived them both, her star in the Academy of Sciences and the media firmament was fixed and unrivaled.

  Getting the high sign from the sound guy on the set, Miriam checked the clock, cursed the tardy Richard Eklund in absentia, and warned Angela.

  “One minute. I’ll count you in.”

  “Okay.”

  “Everybody. We are go in one. Ready?”

  Holding up her hands like an orchestra conductor, she cued the camera, saw the red light come on, and spoke into her headset.

  “Angie? Camera One. On ten . . .”

  Using all ten fingers, Miriam orchestrated the visual cross-fade from STAR 51 PEG, forty light-years away, to Angela’s live, studio close-up.

  “All these dramatic firsts pose a profoundly new question. Not what if there is life out there, but what if life . . . is all around us?”

  Angela paused, holding an enigmatic smile for dramatic effect, then crossed over to the Science Horizon set and her distinguished guests.

  “Anyone interested in joining the discussion on-line, you can find these images and more, plus a new viewer bulletin board, at www.sciencehorizon.org/tolas—spelled T-O-L-A-S.”

  At the meeting in Miriam’s office at 10:00 A.M., the TOLAS bulletin board had been Angela’s idea.

  “I think we can assume Deep Cosmo is watching.”

  “So we use the show to send him a message, establish contact, let him know we got the package and we want to talk,” Miriam said, swiveling in her chair. “It could also scare him the hell off.”

  “If he’s not talking to us, he’s as good as scared off already,” Angela pointed out. “I think we’re demonstrating good faith.”

  But Miriam Kresky was not thinking about Deep Cosmo right now. She was too busy cuing visuals, calling cameras, and wondering how she could ever have thought that late-ass geek Eklund was attractive.

  “What’s the penalty for killing an astronomer, anyway?” She shot a look at the twentysomething mixer working the console faders.

  “Billions and billions of years,” he said in a perfect Carl Sagan cadence that almost made her fall off her chair.

  A half block away in an early-adopted General Motors EV-1, Eklund had long since given up on his malfunctioning cell phone and turned off both the a/c and the radio in a desperate effort to conserve electricity.

  “Come on, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!”

  Being jammed up in traffic and trapped in an electric car running out of charge was a uniquely agonizing purgatory for a techno-freak and avowed environmentalist. A warning light flashed on the dashboard: 5% OF CHARGE REMAINING/RANGE .5 MILES.

  “Oh, no.” He checked his watch and pounded the dash in frustration.

  Honking the horn could drain the last trickle from his battery pack, so Eklund had been reduced to fiddling with his wilting hand-tied bow tie and yelling things out the car window.

  “Yes! Yes! Just move over. Just move it a little bit . . . Yes!”

  At last able to maneuver into the PBS parking structure, Eklund raced up the concrete ramp on his last remaining electrons. He felt abjectly stupid and embarrassed for being so late. But as he jumped out of the car and ran flat out into the building, he reminded himself that nobody was going to kill him for screwing up the show and if he was lucky they’d still have time for at least part of his planned presentation.

  Later he’d wish that they had just killed him.

  At Goddard, Eklund had given them a private glimpse of several archived NASA photos showing intriguing Martian anomalies, from tubelike structures to triangular monoliths. Angela and Miriam had been extremely impressed. And after being assured that all of the images were available for broadcast use and in the public domain, Angela had pitched him their idea.

  “Okay, here’s the deal. We want to provoke or inspire whoever sent that TOLAS disk I showed you into making contact with us and starting a dialogue. And to do that, we’re going to produce a show about NASA’s search for life in the solar system. And we’d like you to come on and make the case for the Intelligence Hypothesis on Mars.”

  “We’ve invited Paula Winnick,” Miriam added, in the flat, matter-of-fact way she had acquired as a producer when invoking famous names. It was Eklund’s turn to be impressed.

  “Really.”

  “And we have confirmed Professor Stephen Weintraub.”

  “Mars Observer imaging team. Wow.” Eklund sat up alertly, his mind shifting into a higher gear: this was pretty much raising the bar as high as it went.

  “So, Richard, what do you think?”

  While he took a moment to mull it over Miriam studied what Eklund was wearing.

  Leather suspenders and a bow tie with little red rockets? She decided that a major part of him was still a twelve-year-old boy who loved the idea of space exploration more than anything, and she found his grown-up sense of style in expressing this both eccentric and rather charming.

  “What about the TOLAS photo?” Eklund said.

  “We’re considering showing it to Weintraub. But not until after the show.”

  “We thought Stephen’d be a good person to authenticate.”

  Eklund blinked. An acknowledged NASA satellite imaging expert, Cornell Professor Stephen Weintraub, confirming the authenticity of TOLAS would carry significant weight in the science community.

  “So?” Miriam smiled, wondering with a professional eye how the offbeat, speedy, but earnest scientist would come off on camera. Her grin balanced flirtation and dare in equal measure. Eklund found it impossible to resist.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “It’s what we don’t want you to do,” Angela said. “You absolutely cannot mention the TOLAS image, period.”

  “Understood.”

  “What we do want is for you to do just what you did today.”

  “You mean present the Mars anomalies I find hardest to explain away and then defend them against high-caliber, articulate skepticism.”

  Miriam added a note of fair warning.

  “It could be fairly adversarial skepticism.”

  Eklund understood, but it was such a great opportunity. At the very least it would put the Intelligence Hypothesis out there and get a few million people thinking about how exciting a manned mission to Mars would be and what might be waiting there to be found.

  Still, he was smart enough to know that the prospect of heavyweights like Dr. Paula Winnick poking holes in his hypothesis on PBS ought to give him pause.

  “Yes, debating a Nobel laureate should be interesting.”

  “You can pass, Richard, if you don’t feel ready. I know it’s short notice,” Angela said, meaning it. But Eklund smiled ruefully in Miriam’s direction.

  �
��No, no. They’ll both probably eat my lunch. But what the hell.”

  It proved a prescient, if cavalier, observation. In fact, once the taping of his segment of Science Horizon was over, he only hoped that nobody he had told about it would actually tune in to see what he considered his rattled defensive argumentation and unfortunate presentation.

  The photos of intriguing objects captured by Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey may have wowed a few lay viewers, and he’d made some points. But all things considered, he felt he had largely screwed the pooch: the impressive and intimidating Drs. Weintraub and Winnick had sliced and diced him with an almost seamless politeness.

  Angry at himself, Eklund passed on the postshow cocktail party despite entreaties from both Miriam and Angela, who clearly felt bad for him, which was also embarrassing.

  Instead, he phoned the Triple A and went straight out to the parking structure with the minimum of good-byes: he still had a transportation problem.

  “Zero-emissions piece of shit.”

  Eklund glared at his aging, red EV-1, blaming it for making his gridlock lateness so stressful, throwing him off his game and now dragging out his already excruciating exit. Pacing in front of the shiny dead-in-the-water electric car, he tore at his bow tie.

  “Fuck the ozone layer, you green-ass piece of shit.”

  He reconsidered the virtues of the ultralow-emissions hybrid vehicles from Honda and the Toyota and decided it was trade-in time. He wanted nothing this humiliating to happen to him again in this lifetime. But mostly Eklund just wanted to go home and get drunk.

  Which, as soon as the Triple A truck showed up, is exactly what he did.

  17

  This guy Eklund is out of his mind, Winston thought.

  An upwardly osculating staffer had taped Science Horizon and couriered a copy out to Bob Winston’s all-white Federal-style home in the Maryland suburbs. He thought the national security adviser would find it amusing.

  Scowling through Eklund’s exposition of unexplained Mars anomalies as he washed down microwaved beef bourguignon with a Boodles gin martini, Winston was more appalled than amused.