“Meet me after the show?” Gordon whispered urgently. She turned, smiled that beautiful smile at him, shook her head, snatched up her hoodie and somehow managed to leap off the stage onto the railing at the edge of the pit, then over the mass of people at the edge of the pit to land in a small opening amongst them. She faded tracelessly into the crowd.
Despite watching video over and over Gordon never could see the hole in the crowd until she landed in it. Nor could he see how Donsaii disappeared into the throng like a pebble sinking into a pond. He knew he couldn’t be in love; he’d never even really met her, or talked to her, or gotten to know her in any real sense. But he could close his eyes and see that final smile she gave him. It had to be simple infatuation, but he wanted so desperately to send her messages proclaiming his… his… whatever it was, he wanted to proclaim it…
***
Emma stopped Ell. She had a grin from ear to ear, “Hey, I got the spectroscope set up and shot an analysis of the atmosphere of that third Tau Ceti planet through the port on Heinlein.”
“And?!”
Emma shrugged her shoulders, “Well… there just might… maybe…be…”
Ell grinned and punched her in the shoulder, “Spit it out!”
Emma rubbed her shoulder and stuck out her lower lip, “Ow!”
Ell said, “Oh, come on, that didn’t really hurt!”
Emma grinned slyly at her, “Oxygen?”
“Oh!” Ell threw her arms around Emma, “you’re lucky that shoulder doesn’t hurt worse than it does! What else did you identify?”
“Hmmm, there might be… let’s see… maybe…”
Ell drew her hand back.
Emma threw her hands up in surrender, “I give, I give. Nitrogen, CO2, water vapor.”
Ell shrieked and threw her arms around Emma again. They bounced up and down together for a few minutes.
Roger walked over, “What’s got you ladies so excited?”
Ell grinned slyly at Emma and stage whispered, “Do you think we should tell him?”
Emma looked up at Roger, “Yep, but we should make him wait ‘til tonight when we take him out with us to our celebratory dinner.”
Roger’s eyes widened, “Nooo, you wouldn’t do that would you?”
They went to dinner at La Mez and made Roger wait until after dinner. After Ell had finished her own dessert and half of Emma’s, Roger leaned back and looked from one to the other, “Well?”
Emma grinned and in a sing-song voice said, “We’ve been keeping a see-cret.”
He raised an eyebrow and waited.
Ell leaned closer to him, “You know there’s no theoretical limit on the distance we can send something through a single ended port, right?”
He looked back and forth at the grinning girls.
Ell said, “Nor any limit on how far we can get data back through a PGR chip, yes?”
Roger’s eyebrows shot up, “You opened a port to a star?!!”
Emma turned to Ell and stage whispered, “See, I told you he wasn’t as dumb as he looks!”
Roger gaped, “Alpha Centauri?”
Ell grinned, “Tau Ceti.”
“Holy crap! You did it this morning?”
“No, a few weeks ago, back before the election.”
“And you’re just telling me now?!”
“Yeah, well a lot of stuff happened right about then that kinda distracted us.”
“So, what were you cheering about this morning?”
Ell suddenly rose saying “Oops, I’ve got a call from my Mom.” She looked at Emma, “You tell him, I’ve got to deal with a family issue.” She winked at Emma with the eye Roger couldn’t see and left at a rapid walk despite protests from both Roger and Emma.
***
“Have you seen it?”
USA Gymnastics head coach Natya Kolmenya looked away from her screen and raised her eyebrows, “What?”
Vanessa rolled her eyes, “Don’t you ever watch the news? A video of Donsaii dancing is all over the news!”
Natya rolled her eyes in turn, “I don’t care about dancing. Even the dancing of an ex-Olympic champion.”
“Well you should. The girl is twenty now, five foot eight, doesn’t work out at a gym and look at this!” Vanessa popped the video up on the big screen on the far wall of Natya’s office.
Natya watched the girl swirling in a very pretty dance to a nice slow guitar song. She turned to Vanessa, “This is nice but I don’t have…”
Vanessa was pointing at the screen where the tempo had suddenly doubled as an entire band came in on the music. Natya slowly slumped back in her chair as she watched Donsaii recreate many of the impossible flips that she’d performed in her last Olympics floor routine, perfectly on the heavy beat so that they looked like dance moves. The space she was doing them in was tiny. She didn’t have room to run, just to do the flips! Natya’s shock that the girl could still do these things in such a space, at age twenty, without a rigorous training program or a “spring floor” gave way to goosebumps when Donsaii concluded with a twisting triple that Natya had to run back in slow motion to analyze. It was another acrobatic element that she hadn’t used in the last Olympics! When Donsaii landed, Natya leaned forward and put her chin in her hands, staggered by what she’d just seen. Four years ago, at the previous Olympics, this girl had—without her coaches even being aware that she could do them— trotted out nine, count ‘em, nine never before performed acrobatic gymnastic elements, now known as “Donsaiis.” Three of them had been on the floor exercise. Despite intense efforts all around the world by countless elite gymnasts since then, only one of those nine Donsaiis had been replicated by another gymnast without a fall. That one had been done by a man and the landing had been wide based and flailing. Now Donsaii had just shown the world she could still do them four years later. And she’d added another element that other gymnasts could aspire to but never achieve! “My God!” she said sadly.
Vanessa said, “We’ve got to recruit her!”
Natya shook her head despondently, “I’ve tried and I’ve tried. She says that gymnastics are in the past for her.”
“They are not! Did you watch that?! Not only can she still do all those moves, she can do another one she’s never even shown the world!”
“You know she’ll be 24 at the next Olympics right?”
“I’ll bet she’ll still be the best in the world!”
Natya tilted her head querulously, “Yeah, you’re probably right. Do you want to call her?”
Vanessa’s eyebrows rose, “Sure!”
“OK. I’ve got a suggestion.”
Vanessa shrugged.
“Don’t try to talk her into coming to training camp. Just offer to give her a spot on the team. No practices, no time out of her normal routine. Just show up at the Olympics and do your thing.”
“What!” Vanessa said, “The other gymnasts… they wouldn’t stand for it!”
“Do you want her, or not?”
“Well… yes.”
“Do you think she’ll still be able to win every gold medal at the next Olympics even if she doesn’t come to camp?”
“Uhhh…” She shrugged, “You’re right, she’s just proved she could have won them all at this past summer’s Olympics. I imagine she’ll still by far be the best in the world at the next one.”
“I think she just doesn’t want to commit any time to it. Maybe, just maybe, if you offer her the opportunity to just show up at the Olympics and perform… maybe she’d do it?”
***
The next morning Roger stopped Ell, “Holy crap Ms. Donsaii!” His eyebrows were high and a huge smile split his face. “A mission to Tau Ceti in spaceship Heinlein? Your first star shot and it finds an oxygen planet?! You’re on a roll!” He put his palm up for a “high five.”
Ell slapped his hand and said, “We’re on a roll Dr. Emmerit! I just hope our own planet’s around long enough for us to see what Heinlein finds at Tau Ceti.”
“Oh, a pessimist to
day are we? I’m not worried, you’re on a roll!”
About an hour later Ell caught Emma off to one side. “How’d it go?” she asked in a low voice.
Emma shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t really know. Like you suggested, I told him how much I admired him. He seemed pretty surprised but then,” Emma rolled her eyes, “told me about how long he’d had a ‘thing’ for you. Even when you’re not there, you’re still crushing my love life.”
Ell said, “Take it from me,” she grinned, “someone who should know because she has never in her life had a single serious boyfriend—I think you just need to let it percolate without pushing him. Keep being your friendly self and see if he doesn’t start to treat you differently.”
Emma snorted, “You’re right, I must be insane to be taking advice from you. You don’t have any experience. Gorgeous as you are, you’ve probably never been turned down for anything. You don’t even know what it’s like to crash and burn all broken hearted.”
Ell hugged her, “It’s that crazy willingness to take bad advice that I love about you Em’.”
***
After his planetary sciences lecture concluded Professor Norris turned to find the platinum blond girl with the bad skin waiting to ask him a question. Mentally he rolled his eyes, thinking that she seemed like the kind of bimbo that would try to bat her eyes at him hoping to get him to adjust her grade. “Yes, Ms.?”
“Donovan, sir. I just wanted to ask about oxygen atmospheres. Is there any other mechanism besides life that would cause a planet to have an oxygen atmosphere?”
His eyebrows rose, “Donovan” was the name of the student who was killing the curve in this class. She virtually never got a question wrong and right now had a mean grade of 99% for all the work in the class so far. The closest student to her was back at 94% and her classmates were all bitching about how hard his tests were. They weren’t impossible though, as Donovan had been proving week after week. He dragged his mind back on topic. Not a bimbo, OK. “Um, no. Oxygen is tremendously reactive and without plants to constantly replenish it, it would quickly form oxides and disappear from the atmosphere. It might be possible to imagine a chemically based event that would temporarily create an oxygen atmosphere, but it would never last. Why do you ask?”
“Um, just wondering. Thank you.” She turned and walked away. Hmmm, girl could be cute. Sad she’s got sketchy skin and a big butt.
Late Wednesday morning when Ell got back from her classes, Roger told her that the pusher motors had just been finished. A big load of five kilogram iron impactors had come in the day before, so they were ready to start pushing the comet. Roger already had an impactor screwed onto a pusher and had tested its thruster, attitude jets and cameras in the test room. About ten minutes after Ell arrived they popped it through the port and Allan sent it streaking toward Hearth-Daster. They assembled another motor-impactor and tested it, then sent it on its way toward the comet about four hours after the first one. They launched two more impactors on Thursday and again on Friday.
***
Kitt’s Peak, Arizona—Astronomers at the observatory tell us they are “astonished” by the enormous increase in the size of the “tail” of Comet Hearth-Daster. The tails of comets are made up of volatile outgassings of frozen material in the comet and this one is outgassing much larger quantities, much earlier in its approach to the sun than any other recorded comet. Larger telescopes are being turned…
Monday morning Ell said, “Well, we had hoped for a deflection of 12 kilometers per hour from those six impactors, but after observing the comet over the weekend, Allan estimates that the deflection was only 9.5 kph. Still, that would move the comet 24,000 kilometers in the three and a half months remaining.” They were moving it north as well as farther ahead of Earth in Earth’s orbit. 24,000 kilometers was enough to make it miss the earth, however they were very worried about inaccuracies in the projected course and changes that might result from outgassing events as the comet heated up passing the sun. “What do you guys think we should do now?”
Roger said, “I think we should keep hitting it. I want it to miss us by a long way. No close calls for this ol’ boy, no sirree.”
Emma grinned at him, “Me too.”
Wilson raised his hand, “Me three.”
Ell grinned at them, “Me four… Well it’s back to slaving away over rockets then.”
Manuel refurbished the pusher motors, Emma mounted them on the impactors, Roger took them into the test room to run them through their paces and Wilson loaded them through the port and sent them on their way. Ell ran “recovery operations” as she called it, which meant that she stood by as Allan flew the pusher motors back through the 7.5 cm port and into the vacuum chamber they’d set up for it. The motors actually barely nudged their front ends through the port where gravity took over. They then fell onto a large pad at the bottom of a heavy glass cylinder. Once the port opened the glass cylinder was opened to the vacuum of space so after the port closed she had to vent air into the cylinder to open it and get the pusher rocket out of it.
They sent two impactors on Monday, and then two more every day for two more weeks. They could have sent more per day, but the currently available natural gas pipeline at D5R couldn’t supply enough gas to run more than two rockets’ engines at a time. Once it had become routine, they took turns with one person doing everything, especially on the weekends and over Thanksgiving.
At the end of the month Allan reported that they’d achieved a deflection of an additional 60 kph for a total deflection of 145,000 kilometers by the time it crossed Earth’s orbit.
Wilson turned to Ell, “We seem to have gotten more deflection out of the later impactors than the first ones. Why would that be?”
Ell stared into the distance, “Well, the impacts have blown some material off of the comet by now, so it masses a little less and should be slightly easier to deflect. But I think it’s probably mostly due to off center impacts. These rockets are flying nearly fourteen million kilometers while they’re accelerating, and even though they have a high level AI in control, I think it’s amazing that none of the impactors have actually missed the comet. But most of them probably do hit a little off center and don’t maximize the possible deflection when they do. I think that most of the change is because Allan is getting better aim and hitting closer to the center of the comet as time goes along, so we’re getting more deflection per hit.”
Ell looked around at the little “comet group” and said, “Should we keep hitting it?”
Roger said, “All our calculations say Earth should be safe now, but things might get messed up during perihelion. I vote we wait until it comes around the sun and recalculate its trajectory then, when the orbital trajectory should be more stable. Then we can hit it more if we want.”
“We’ll have to hit it harder to move it the same distance then.”
“I know, and it scares me. But if it needs to be moved more, that would be because we have big errors in our current calculations. If that’s the case, we could be moving it closer with what we’re doing now, we really have no idea.”
Ell grinned, “Yeah and if we knock off for a while now, we can all take a nice break for Christmas.” She waggled her eyebrows and grinned at them. “However, I’m gonna ask Sheila to talk to the LOX supplier and LNG supplier and get them to put in huge tanks for us and tell them we may want very large quantities in January. Just in case we need to hit it with a lot more impactors in a short period of time… we’ll want to be able to accelerate them at high Gs and we can’t do that with gaseous propellants.”
The team all nodded, Roger saying, “If things look bad then, we may need to bring in everyone at D5R for an ‘all hands on deck’ effort to save the planet.”
“Yeah, and we might have to install some illegal ports at LOX and LNG distributors if our survival depends on it…”
Chapter Twelve
Simon Shelton looked askance at his flute of champagne. “You know,” he said to Ephrai
m Goldwasser, the Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, “You’d think that after giving literally thousands of lectures that something like this wouldn’t be able to make me nervous anymore.”
Comet! Page 20
