Aftermath a-1

by Charles Sheffield

  “Coming from a pessimist like you, I take that as a rave report. All right.” Zoe leaned back. “It’s showtime again, folks. And here is the plan. Lewis will perform reentry first. As you know, it can only hold three people. Those three are going to be Zoe Nash, Ludwig Holter, and Alta Mclntosh-Mohammad. I will pilot Lewis. Then, unless someone wants to stay up here and wait for the next shuttle up from Earth” — Zoe smiled at her joke, but no one else did — “Clark will take Reza Armani, Jenny Kopal, Celine Tanaka, and Wilmer Oldfield. Reza will pilot Clark.

  “Lewis will send telemetry back here all the time during reentry, except when it goes through the period of radio blackout. I believe the increased mass load on the second reentry will be more than compensated for by the opportunity to fine-tune Clark’s control parameters using the data from Lewis. Any questions so far?”

  There was silence. It was obvious to Celine, as it must be to all of the others, that Zoe had included factors other than mass balance in deciding the complement of the two crews. She had placed the people pairs, Jenny/Reza, Alta/Ludwig, and Celine/Wilmer, on the same orbiter as each other. To some, that might suggest sentiment on Zoe’s part. To a worrywart like Celine, it said that the reentry dangers were more than Zoe was willing to admit. She was offering them a chance to die as the couples that they had become.

  “Now there is the question of where,” Zoe went on. “Where should we aim to land? I think we can make one decision very easily: we avoid the Southern Hemisphere. We’ve picked up hardly a radio signal from there. Also, if we are off in our final along-track position, the Southern Hemisphere offers a higher chance of landing in water. The orbiters are not designed for an ocean splashdown, and even if they were I don’t feel like a thousand-mile swim.

  “The majority of the radio signals we have received come from North America, with considerably more from the northern states than the southern, and more from the east than the west. So north is good, and east is good. We are in a low inclination orbit, so a very high latitude touchdown is not possible. I think we can reach forty degrees north, and I propose that we try to do so. I will aim to make Lewis’s landing close to the fortieth parallel, near the eastern seaboard but at least a hundred miles from the Atlantic Ocean. Normally the orbiters can land on a dime, but we need a margin of error. I will not try to specify a final landing location now, because we have not been able to obtain a clear picture of surface conditions. We’ll see what we have available when we get there. An airport would be nice, but any decent highway will do at a pinch. Naturally, once Lewis is down we’ll send a message telling Clark what to aim for or what to avoid. We’ve been over all this before, in smaller groups. But does anybody have a question or a comment?”

  She waited a few moments, and went on: “Then the only remaining question is, when?

  “We will do one final start-to-finish checkout of everything, which ought to take no more than a few hours. After that, Lewis will take the next available reentry window. The main requirements are that we have a daytime landing — it’s currently night in North America — and that Lewis has line-of-sight communications with those of you who are still here on the Schiaparelli. That means there has to be some orbit matching, but Jenny already did those calculations. Once Lewis is down, we can decide the schedule for Clark based on our experience. Any other questions?”

  “I have been thinking.”

  To Celine’s surprise, the speaker was Wilmer. He almost never contributed to group meetings. Quite often, he didn’t seem to be listening. But he was. He would go away, brood over what he had heard, and return to offer crucial suggestions or devastating criticisms.

  Celine decided that Wilmer understood, better than she had, the nature of this particular meeting. There would be no chance for later discussions. This was it, the final meeting of the Mars expedition until they were all once more on Earth.

  “All right, Wilmer,” Zoe said. “What’s your worry?”

  He put his hand up to scratch the top of his bald head — a habit that looked ludicrous and that Celine had not been able to change. It gave him a permanent and ugly red patch. “This is a suggestion, not a worry. You speak of a line-of-sight requirement for communications, and I assume that you mean radio signals. But I think we should also track the descent of the Lewis visually, using the biggest scope on the Schiaparelli.”

  “What would be the point of that?”

  “Suppose that you encounter trouble during that period of reentry when ionization around the orbiter prevents the transmission of radio signals. Visual observation might then offer the only evidence of the nature of the difficulty.”

  “We don’t anticipate trouble.” Zoe glanced around the rest of the group, who were showing uneasiness in various ways at the implications of Wilmer’s suggestion. “I guess we all like to think positive. But Wilmer is right. If anything were to go wrong with Lewis, the rest of you will need to learn all you can from our difficulties before Clark makes its own return from orbit. Celine, please make sure that the big scope is set up for continuous visual coverage of the reentry of Lewis.

  “Anything else? No?” Zoe went on casually, as though orbital reentry to a radically changed Earth in an untested ship was the most routine operation imaginable. “Let’s get to it, then. I’m fond of the Schiaparelli, and it’s been good to us. But I’m a little bit itchy to get home.”

  “Day” and “night” on the Schiaparelli violated human nature and common sense. The Mars ship was locked into the same orbit as ISS-2, and every ninety minutes brought a new dawn and a new sunset. It took five of those “days,” almost eight hours, before the motion of Earth and ship were synchronized, and Zoe was able to say from the controls of Lewis, “We have thrust. See you all down there.”

  Celine and the other three were in the control room of the Schiaparelli, where they could receive radio inputs from Lewis and visual images from the biggest of the onboard scopes. She looked at Jenny, Reza, and Wilmer and felt a strange uneasiness. Zoe, Ludwig, and Alta had not always been in the same cabin with her on the Schiaparelli; for much of the time on the return journey, they had all hidden themselves away from each other. But in a sense the other six had been “there,” all the time. They had formed a unit, working together in the greatest feat of human exploration ever undertaken.

  Now they were split, and even when they came together again on Earth it would not be the same. Something had been lost in that moment of Lewis’s departure. Celine hated the feeling of loneliness.

  At the moment the orbiter was still close to them, and they did not need a scope to see the blue-white flare of its nuclear rocket. But Lewis dropped away steadily, losing altitude and velocity, and as the minutes passed the ship as seen without the scope dwindled to a fiery spark. It was beginning the long arc down to the atmosphere of the Earth.

  “Everything is nominal.” Zoe’s voice was clear over the telemetry. “The control routines are behaving exactly as we hoped and expected. You will lose radio contact with us in eight minutes.”

  Even when ionization induced a temporary radio silence, the image of the orbiter would still be picked up by the big onboard telescope and displayed on the control-room screen. Celine looked, and saw that Lewis had already switched off its engine and turned for the nose-first reentry. The image of the orbiter was tiny but quite clear. She even imagined she could make out the dots of people’s heads in the cabin’s transparent viewport.

  She glanced at the display showing elapsed time. Only nine minutes since first thrust. It felt much longer.

  “Looking good.” Zoe sounded a fraction fainter, but maybe that was Celine’s imagination. “We are losing altitude as planned and are already experiencing atmospheric drag. We project loss of radio contact in five minutes and seventeen seconds, eight seconds ahead of schedule. Report back receipt of this signal.”

  Celine did so, automatically. The Earth below was invisible. It was still night there, though in another nine minutes Celine would look down onto a sunlit Uni
ted States. Lewis was heading for a single-step reentry. There would be no “bounce” aerobraking as they had used it on Mars, skimming into the upper atmosphere and out again several times, like a pebble skipped across the surface of a lake and shedding velocity on each transit. The Earth orbiters and landers all accomplished reentry in a single pass. Aerodynamic and thermal forces were much greater that way, but the ships were designed to take it.

  “The hull indicates an increase over predicted temperature,” Zoe said. Her voice was overlaid with the faintest hiss and crackle. “Parameters are still within the predicted range. Ionization is beginning, somewhat ahead of schedule. We expect radio blackout in two minutes and eleven seconds, seventeen seconds ahead of schedule. Report back receipt of this signal.”

  Celine glanced at the other three in the control room. Jenny was serious, following the flight parameters coming over the telemetry and nodding approval. Reza was smiling, moving his hands as though he were flying the Lewis himself. Wilmer alone seemed worried, his hand to his chin and his heavy brow furrowed.

  “Hull temperature is rising more rapidly.” The distortion in Zoe’s voice was greater. “It is a good deal more than predicted. I have to lessen the angle of attack and I project a change in downrange landing distance. I am taking manual control of orbiter attitude. We expect radio blackout in fifty seconds.”

  More than a minute ahead of schedule. Much too soon.

  “Refer to visuals,” Jenny said softly. Celine looked at the display from the big scope and saw on it a bright arrow trail. The Lewis was the silver tip at the head of the arrow.

  Celine gave one rapid glance at the unmagnified display. The tiny mote of the Lewis, a hundred and more miles beneath the Schiaparelli, was not visible. She said urgently, “Lewis, we are losing radio contact. Report if you are hearing us.”

  The radio signal telemetry sounded in her ears as a loud hiss of static, within which every trace of Zoe’s voice had been lost. The control board provided the real-time power spectrum of the telemetry, and it was pure white noise.

  “They are entering the period of maximum drag and maximum ionization,” Celine said — an unnecessary comment for the others in the control room, who knew it as well as she did, but needed for a full record of events. “This has occurred sixty-six seconds ahead of prediction. Radio contact has been lost.”

  The display from the big scope also showed the nominal flight trajectory for the Lewis as it had been calculated ahead of time. The two curves, computed orange and observed yellow, were diverging. Celine could see the separation increasing as she watched. The real ship was falling far behind its simulated twin.

  “The atmospheric drag force is way high,” Wilmer said suddenly. “The reentry angle must be too steep. It’s as though they made an attitude correction the wrong way.”

  It was useless to ask how he knew — he had his own inexplicable way of making estimates. It was also pointless. The big scope was still providing its display. As Wilmer was speaking, the silver arrow tip brightened.

  “Black body equivalent temperature of Lewis’s hull, forty-two hundred degrees,” Jenny said. She was reading the output of the Schiaparelli’s bolometer. “That exceeds predicted maximum by six hundred degrees.”

  Still well within tolerances. The exotic materials of the orbiter’s hull were rated up to fifty-four hundred degrees. But a normal reentry never came close to that. And Celine did not need the bolometric output to tell her that the temperature of Lewis’s hull was still increasing. The silver arrowhead had become a blaze of blue. Telemetry was a roar of static in her ears.

  “Go up,” Reza said urgently. He was working imaginary controls, pulling back on them. “Forget the one-shot reentry. Go higher, take another shot later.”

  Radio silence was two-way. There was no chance that Zoe Nash could hear him. Frictional heating surrounded the racing orbiter with a blaze of ionized gases.

  “Black body equivalent temperature of Lewis’s hull, six thousand degrees.” Jenny’s voice was a dead whisper. Then, with urgency, “Cool down. You can’t take that for long.”

  She was right. As she spoke, the blazing arrow tip vanished. It was replaced by a puff of white, round and delicate as a cotton ball.

  Celine did not cry out. She leaned forward and covered her face with her hands. That innocuous cottony cloud was an incandescent rage of flaming gas. In its heart were Zoe Nash, Ludwig Holter, and Alta Mclntosh-Mohammad, reduced to their component atoms in Lewis’s fiery explosion.

  They would be carried away by the pendent winds, blown and dispersed by the restless violence of the atmosphere. If the three crew reached a single final landing place, no one would ever know it.

  The control room was silent except for Reza’s harsh breathing. Celine rocked backward and forward, unable to weep or to make any sound. All she could think was that Zoe, supercapable and superconfident Zoe, had been wrong.

  Zoe would not be down on Earth in two days. Zoe would not be there ever.

  15

  The snow had ended. The wind was dropping away to nothing, and with the loss of cloud cover the night had become bitterly and unnaturally cold.

  The ancient frigate chugged south at a leisurely eight knots, while at the bow Saul Steinmetz stood hatted, gloved, and swaddled in winter clothes. His brain was buzzing after a two-hour whirlwind of snap executive judgments that everyone else in government seemed too scared to make. One side effect of Supernova Alpha was Saul’s own apparent apotheosis. No one questioned his authority to do anything.

  The buck stops here. Good old Harry Truman, he said it better than anybody. But it would be nice to think you were making right decisions.

  Saul was alone, but not, he was sure, unobserved. Even if the frigate crew could conquer their natural curiosity at having the President on board, his security staff were still on duty.

  One week ago, heavy rains had pushed the river far above flood stage. The level was lower now, but when the snow melted the waters would rise again, farther than ever. The only evidence for wild conditions upstream lay in the large amount of carried sediment. At night, the heavy suspension of reddish mud did not show. The water lay thick and black as oil, parting smoothly before the old warship’s advance.

  Saul stared downstream. A light was blinking there, alien in its slow staccato. A warning? No, a message, that was much more reasonable. A message intended for this ship?

  Peering at the point of light and wondering about its meaning, Saul allowed his mind to wander away to more personal questions. Was he going to learn something, as he believed, or was he running away? A thousand things needed doing back in his White House second-floor office. Auden Travis was the most diplomatic of aides, but his face had made his views clear when Saul said where he was going. There had been some kind of fight between Auden and Yasmin Silvers. Maybe tonight Saul would learn the cause.

  And what was it between Saul and Tricia? Why had she called, out of the blue, after a two-year silence?

  It was certainly not for lunch and a casual how-are-you. Tricia’s whole history showed that she did nothing casually.

  She had been born Patricia Stennis, poor in Toledo. At age eighteen she had gone to work for the country’s biggest software company, where the next year at a Detroit trade show she had caught the eye of the aging majority shareholder. Six months later they married and she moved to California. She became Patricia Stennis Leighton, and soon after that, Patsy Leighton. She had been totally devoted and loyal to her husband for four years — until, suddenly and surprisingly, they had divorced.

  One year after that Patsy was in Houston, the wife of an oil baron whose ranch sprawled across three hundred square miles and embodied an excess of all forms of bad taste. Trish Beacon, as she was now, enjoyed — or endured, though she would never admit it — two and a half years of Lone Star lifestyle, until finally she and Bobby Beacon divorced.

  The next fall Trish married into some of the oldest money in the country. She moved readily, maybe even
eagerly, from west Texas to Delaware. Again, she was unswervingly loyal to and admiring of her husband. Saul first met her at a reception in Wilmington when she was two years into her third marriage. She was now Tricia Chartrain. He found her breathtakingly attractive. She seemed to take little notice of him, then or at other dinners and social functions where their paths crossed. Always, she talked admiringly of her husband, Willis Chartrain.

  A year later, she called Saul at his Atlanta office. She and dear Willis had divorced — she would prefer not to talk about it. She was in town for a few days, and without an escort for a dinner party. She remembered that Saul’s headquarters were in Atlanta. Would he, as a great favor, consider being her dinner companion?

  Would he? He had ended a long go-nowhere affair two months earlier, soon after the primaries made it clear that he had a good shot at the party nomination. But Saul was Saul. He set the machinery to work, and had a detailed report on Tricia in less than a week. Patricia Stennis/Patsy Leighton/Trish Beacon/Tricia Chartrain had played around some in Toledo and elsewhere when she was very young, but in her marriages she had been either faithful to her husband or infinitely discreet. An association with Tricia was unlikely to ruin Saul on the campaign trail.

  In fact, the report came too late. Saul and Tricia had become lovers on the night of the dinner party. They remained that way, passionate and committed and inseparable, for the next six months. She had a way of devoting herself, totally and unreservedly, to Saul and his interests. It was intoxicating, something he had never known before. He knew that he would give her anything, or give up anything for her.

  Anything, until the day his political advisers came to meet him on the campaign trail in Oregon. Tricia was away, spending a day or two with old friends from the Patsy Leighton software days in San Francisco. The message delivered to Saul was quite clear. They had the poll results and the analysis. Married to Tricia, Saul would lose his bid to be President.