Boundary b-1

by Eric Flint

  "I don't have to decide yet, Joe." Helen was still staring at the image of the impossible. "I have some vague ideas, but I've got months to finish the dig and it'll be at least a year after that before I can get anything published. I think I'll just wait and see what comes up. Wait and see."

  Eric Flint Ryk E. Spoor

  Boundary

  PART II: QUARRLES

  Controversy, n: a prolonged public dispute, debate, or contention; disputation concerning a matter of opinion; contention, strike, or argument.

  Eric Flint Ryk E. Spoor

  Boundary

  Chapter 5

  A.J. Baker skipped down the hall, drawing tolerant stares from other members of the Ares Project. He might have just turned twenty-eight years old, but after the year or so he'd been with Ares they had stopped expecting him to act much more than eighteen. He bounced through Glenn Friedet's office door, making the harried-looking project director jump.

  "I swear, A.J.," Glenn sighed, "more than half of my gray hairs come from you."

  "Well, let me see if I can make your day a happier one, Fearless Leader." A.J. slapped a sheet of paper down in front of Glenn.

  That got Glenn's attention. "Paper? From you?"

  A.J. grinned, smugly aware of his reputation as someone so far out on the bleeding edge that he considered paper and papyrus to be equally outmoded.

  "You won't begrudge me the death of that tree, Glenn."

  Glenn's gaze scanned the paper. "They went for it!"

  "You better believe they did!" He bounced around the office. "Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! I get to build Tinkerbell, Ariel, and the rest of my Faeries! And get to make all the rest of your engineers modify the designs on Pirate!"

  The latter made Glenn wince. Wince twice, actually, first at A.J.'s official use of the very unofficial nickname of the Automated Arean Reconnaissance Rover and Return module. Officially A^2 R^3 -which had led to its own spate of Star Wars jokes-the longhand acronym AARRR had been pronounced in such a way as to inevitably be followed by "matey," "walk the plank," and so on, thereby causing the obvious moniker of Pirate to refer to the test vehicle.

  The second wince was at the equally inevitable complaints the redesign would engender from the engineers.

  A.J. recognized both winces with satisfaction. "Hey, Glenn, I told them I would win this one. They should've planned for it."

  "Actually, they probably did. But with two more months going by than we'd expected, we were getting pretty settled into the other design."

  "So, do I call up NASA and tell them to keep their money?"

  Glenn laughed. "Not a chance. We can use all we can get, and none of the critical construction stages have been passed yet- though this was close."

  "I'll go get things started in RDD, then. You get someone processing the files-I've already digisigned everything to authorize my end and you'll find the secure contract files in your inbox."

  A.J. jogged out, giving another whoop of triumph as he exited the office area. His grin grew even wider as he headed toward Research, Development and Design.

  It was finally sinking in. Despite his words, he hadn't been nearly so sure NASA would go for his proposal. It made sense, true, but sense often didn't have much to do with government contracts, especially when the government agency in question was competing with the proposing private organization.

  The Ares Project.

  It had been A.J.'s dream since he was a kid to be able to go into space, and especially to land on Mars. But despite some initial rumbles in that direction in the very early part of the twenty-first century, the government's efforts to land a manned mission on the Red Planet had progressed only haltingly, with the vast complexity, immense inertia, and often wrongheaded design strategies that had characterized government space missions for years.

  With a new generation of engineers agitating for private space missions, the U.S. government had finally authorized a few incentives for private space work. A series of prizes had been established for achieving certain space-travel goals, with a general eye towards eventually reaching Mars.

  The prizes involved were mere pittances, needless to say, from the point of view of most government agencies and megacorporations. But they were large enough to warrant an attempt by moderate-sized consortia of interested organizations. The idea itself had its genesis in Robert Zubrin's The Case For Mars, and the Ares Project had been formed to seize the opportunity. Many of the founders were, of course, the same people who had hounded the government into arranging the prizes. Collectively, the group had gained the nickname of the Nuts That Roared, for their Grand Fenwickian victory over the ponderous and generally unswervable inertia of official space programs.

  The public had started to take notice when the Ares Project successfully orbited, deorbited, and retrieved a fully functional man-capable space module-and did it for a million dollars less than the prize money for that achievement. But it was the follow-on Ares-2, a smaller but fully automated sensing satellite, that galvanized public opinion. The completely privately constructed spacecraft reached the Red Planet, used aerobraking to achieve orbital velocity, and sent back multiple high-quality images. And did it at a smaller cost than any equivalent government probe to date.

  Stung into high gear by these successes, the politicians had showered money onto the space program. NASA and its associated partner agencies suddenly found themselves with quadrupled budgets and a mandate to get a manned spacecraft to Mars-and the unspoken mandate to manage the task before the Ares Project beat them to it.

  Politics and government approaches still influenced the work at NASA, of course, and part of that caused NASA to avoid using many of the approaches which Ares used. This suited members of the Project, like A.J., just fine. If NASA decided to copy their methods, it might well outdo the Project despite its current lead.

  For A.J.'s purposes, one important way in which they had taken a lesson from the Project was to avoid what Zubrin had called the "Siren Call" of the moon: i.e., to see the establishment of a moon base as a necessary precursor to a Mars expedition. The important way in which they had not taken that lesson was politically connected. The moon-base faction had been persuaded to give up on a Luna base, and a compromise reached: that a base would be constructed on Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars.

  This was not something the Ares Project was directly interested in, but it made a lot more sense than building a base on Earth's moon. Phobos had no gravity well to speak of, and aerobraking in Mars' atmosphere could help in achieving a matched orbit at a reasonable cost. That done, the closeness of the moonlet would allow excellent surveying of parts of Mars.

  Better still, there had been some indications from prior probes, including the ill-fated Soviet Phobos 2, that there might be some fossil deposits of water on Phobos, which was over twenty kilometers wide. That wasn't really surprising, since both Phobos and its brother moon Deimos were suspected to be captured outer-system bodies, possibly the cores of former comets. So the Phobos project was justifiable on its own terms while still being reasonably well integrated into NASA's overall mission design. And-always a critical factor in the world inhabited by government agencies and the megacorporations with whom they maintained an incestuous relationship-the Phobos project kept the existing vested interests happy. A moon base, after all, was a moon base, regardless of what moon it was on.

  It was here that A.J. had seen an opportunity. Obviously, no one-neither government regulatory agencies nor private insurance companies-was going to let the Ares Project blast human beings into space without firm proof that all aspects of the proposed system would work safely. Pirate was an unmanned device designed to demonstrate the most critical aspects of the system: to be able to travel to the Red Planet with no return fuel, just a small store of "seed" hydrogen; to be able to create fuel from Mars' atmosphere; and then return to Earth using Mars-manufactured propellant.

  A rover unit was to be deployed during the atmospheric fuel manufacturing stage to do surveying o
f the area, which was one of the prime locations currently considered for final landing of a manned mission. It would also leave the first "hab"-habitable enclosure-on Mars, although it was a scaled-down version from the full-scale "tuna cans" in the forthcoming main prep flights. The "hab" would serve as a testbed for the long-term operation of some of the systems and as a radio beacon as well.

  A.J. had proposed a modification of this mission profile which would serve NASA's interests and those of the Ares Project: instead of immediately landing, Pirate would aerobrake into an orbit close to that of Phobos, and would release a number of independent, remotely controllable sensor-probe units. The probes would survey Phobos carefully from all directions in a number of spectra, helping them to select the best places for NASA's base. Pirate would then deorbit and carry out its basic mission. Though now, probably, with no rover or a much smaller one, to make up for the extra mass of the sensor drones that A.J. called his "Faeries."

  The price tag for A.J.'s proposed modification was substantial for Ares-around twelve million dollars-but was far, far less than NASA would have to spend on any similar mission. Assuming they could do it at all-which, as far as A.J. was concerned, they couldn't. They didn't have him, and that meant that they simply wouldn't be able to design sensor drones good enough.

  Apparently, NASA agreed, because they had accepted his proposal and hadn't even quibbled on the price.

  The doors slid aside as he approached. "Joe!" he bellowed, making everyone in the room jump. "I believe in Faerie tales!"

  Dr. Joe Buckley frowned at him for a moment before catching on. "Well, dammit, why'd they have to wait so long? We've spent the past two months refining the rover designs and the interior supports. Not to mention-"

  "Oh, don't gripe, Joe. You'll still get to build the rovers. They'll be used in the next launch-hell, they'll be used in every mission we land, I'll bet. But this first mission will help pay for your rovers, and it's not like all of you won't get something to do in the redesign. I'm going to need half the machine and prototyping group to whip up prototypes of the Faeries. You'll want to try to design a chibi-rover to do at least some of the other stuff we wanted to test on the ground. The main capsule guys are going to need to design the drop-off module so we can match them up with Phobos' orbital speed exactly. I sure don't want to have to make the Faeries try to play orbital catchup; it'd play merry hell with the mass ratio and energy budget. And we'll all be playing games to figure out the best design for the drive systems on the things."

  Joe grinned. "Sure. But you know how we engineers hate being kicked out of a nice comfortable rut. Now you're going to make us all work."

  "True. Still, don't I get any thanks for bringing us in about twelve million bucks?"

  A.J. found himself blushing as the entire engineering group on duty answered by giving him a standing ovation, something he hadn't actually expected. If there were going to be serious gripes about the changes, apparently they weren't going to be addressed at him.

  "Umm…" The claps trailed off, leaving him in an awkward silence. "Thanks. Thanks a lot, guys."

  "Aw, c'mon, you're embarrassing him!" Joe said, grinning. "Next he'll start getting teary-eyed and thanking the Academy and all that kind of thing. Enough of all this, let's get to work-we've got a hell of a lot of redesign work to do, and if we want to make this launch target, we've got just six months to do it all!"

  Eric Flint Ryk E. Spoor

  Boundary

  Chapter 6

  "For the last time, Joe-no." As if to emphasize the point, she sat down at the desk in her office with a solid-sounding plump that properly belonged to a woman much heavier than she was.

  "It's not going to hurt my career, Helen!" Joe Buckley looked just as stubborn as Helen did. "I've gotten my doctorate now, and as far as the rest goes…" He snorted derisively. "I doubt if more than two percent of the people in my field know the difference between a triceratops and a tricycle-and less than half of the ones who do could care, anyway."

  "That's not the point, and you know it," Helen said bluntly. "You want to do the spaceman thing just like your friend A.J., except you're willing to follow the standard route with NASA if the Ares Project doesn't pan out. Well, Joe, you and I both know that there's nothing more political than a national space program. Get associated with the wrong weirdos and you'll never get picked. It doesn't matter what your colleagues think-they're not the ones who call the political shots at NASA. And I might well be the absolutely wrong weirdo."

  "Come on. The way you've written the paper, no one can gripe at you. It's not like you even say anything controversial."

  Helen laughed humorlessly. "Joe, you worked with me for how long? And you still think they can't gripe any time they want to? Of course, they can. And they will, because they'll notice exactly what I'm not saying-when, normally, I'd be expected to say quite a bit. At the museum next week they probably won't tear me to shreds, but after the paper comes out publicly and the axes start getting ground…"

  She shook her head. "By the time of the North American Paleontology Conference next year someone will absolutely crucify me. Might even be Nicholas Glendale."

  Joe grimaced. Glendale was far and away the best known paleontologist in the country. And, somewhat unusually, his popular acclaim was matched by professional respect from his colleagues. Tall, handsome, with salt-and-pepper hair and a toothy grin, Nicholas Glendale was a regular figure for interviews, movie consulting jobs, and had written several best-selling books on paleontology.

  He'd also been a solid fieldworker, early in his career, though he hadn't done any fieldwork in many years. For at least a decade, now, he'd been generally considered one of paleontology's top theorists. He had, in fact, been one of Helen's instructors for her graduate work-and probably the best.

  If Glendale did decide to weigh in against Helen's work, she could really be in for trouble.

  Helen saw the wince and smiled wryly. "You finally get it. And no, my chivalrous friend, there's nothing you can do about it. If you were thirty years older and at the top of the profession, maybe. But then you'd most likely be on the other side, anyway. If things work out well, don't worry. You'll all get the credit you deserve. I'll shout it from the top of the library building, if I have to."

  "I'm not worried about that!"

  "Maybe not, but I am. That's the part that rankles most about not putting your name-and Jackie's, Bill's and Carol's-on this paper. I feel like I'm cheating you, even while I'm trying to keep you out of the mudslinging. The only reason A.J. is listed is because his field won't care about ours, and it's really our only payment to him for the work he did."

  "Well, then, don't worry, okay? None of us think anything like that."

  He glanced at the sheaf of papers that summarized the many months of work Helen had done at the dig. Joe himself, along with Jackie, had only participated that first summer before their engineering careers made any further such time-consuming sidelines impossible.

  He grinned as he once more read the name in the title. "And Jackie, at least, is getting her credit right there."

  "… of Bemmius secordii."

  Helen finished and looked up. She tried to maintain a detached and professional expression, but it wasn't easy. Half of her wanted to burst out laughing at the expressions around the table, and the other half wanted to dive into a foxhole.

  The room was silent. For a long time.

  Finally, one of the visitors cleared his throat and said: "The study of the raptors is brilliant. But I noticed that you don't speculate on the holes in the skeletons. Or on the-ah, pebbles-that you found scattered about the site."

  "That's true," replied Helen. "I simply reported the facts. People can draw whatever conclusions they choose. I don't feel I'm in a position to do so. Michael Jennings feels he has an excellent explanation for them, however, and he will be describing his theory in a separate paper."

  Silence.

  Another visitor spoke.

  "Your tr
eatment of the new species is also very restrained. The description is excellent, and I personally found your analysis of the presumed shape and locomotion quite convincing. But again, you draw no general conclusions. You don't even attempt to locate the animal within any established phylum."

  "You're right. Where would you put it?"

  Silence.

  After another long pause, Director Bonds spoke.

  "One small point, Helen. I'm a little puzzled by the name you've chosen for this new species. The species name is for the Secords, of course. But why the generic name?"

  Helen managed to keep from smiling. "Oh, I don't know. I needed a name, and that one just came to me."

  Fortunately, none of the people in that room were regular readers of science fiction. So she got away with it.

  That was the easy one, she thought to herself an hour later, relaxing in the chair of the borrowed office. The museum had supported the dig, was getting the skeletons, and had every reason to accept whatever they got. But the peer-review process was bound to get interesting. By the time the paper came out publicly, months from now, the whole field would be alerted to the gist of its content. That would generate an instant academic brawl, which would reach a climax at the major conference next year.

  The phone rang. Startled, she stared at the warbling instrument for a moment before finally picking it up. "Dr. Kamen's office, Dr. Sutter speaking."

  "What's up, Doc? How'd the grilling go?"

  Even over the phone, Helen recognized the exuberant voice. She was startled to hear it, though. She wouldn't have thought that, after more than a year, A.J. Baker would have still been following her work. She knew from Joe Buckley that his friend Baker was up to his eyeballs in his own project at Ares.

  That's… kind of intriguing, actually.

  She shook off the thought. "Not too badly, A.J. They knew I was dancing around certain subjects, sure. But they didn't want to go there either, so that works out pretty well for me."