“So why didn’t you tell anyone about this right away?”
Christie looked sheepish.
“I thought everyone else already knew. The technique has been around since the 21st century. Dr. Nicholas Cowan called it ‘rotational unmixing.’ I added it on top of the method originated by Dr. Jeff Cooke at Swinburne University in old Australia for examining distant supernovae. We all received the same data from the telescopes and spectrographs. I was surprised that no one else came to the same conclusions I did. Then I realized no one else was paying attention to the interim data. I had something I could write a paper about. You have no idea how nice it was to be the first name on an abstract for a change.”
“They all deleted the wobbles,” Rob said. “So you made it look like magic.”
She looked rueful.
“Yeah, about that. What do we do about Conrad raising doubts about superstition and all that? I’m not used to being ashamed of my work.”
Doug drew her along the corridor toward the exit with a grin on his face that he couldn’t suppress.
“We’re all writers. There’s nothing wrong with your science. Let’s divert the attention back where it belongs. Change the narrative. Interpret the data for your audience. Rob and I have been talking. If you don’t mind me taking a page from your own book, so to speak, I think we can make this seeming PR disaster into a big success.”
He transferred a small file from his tablet to hers. She read the scant paragraphs and her eyes widened.
“What a great idea,” she said. “I can do that on my head.” For the first time she seemed her old, quietly enthusiastic self. She looked around at the crowds passing by. “I’ve got to find someone. I’ll see you on the panel tomorrow.”
She strode away from them and disappeared in the burst of sunlight from the terminal door.
“I knew it,” Rob said. “This is going to be a great conference.”
O O O
The enormous amphitheatre was overflowing with humanity: scientists, reporters, bureaucrats, pundits, politicians, and thousands of fans of the space program. Doug passed among the crowd, trying to ignore the unfamiliar feeling of being jostled. He was surprised how many faces he knew. Some were colleagues, but many he recognized from their pictures on the Internet.
Crowds had formed around the astronauts. He spotted Captain Ready towering over the circle of admirers, and assumed the others must be close by. But by far the largest group was around Conrad Barlow. For the first time he had a devoted audience.
For the last time, Doug hoped.
The chronometer function on his tablet went off. He excused himself from his conversation and made his way up toward the dais. Throughout the audience, he noticed small colored lights. Each attendee was furnished with a light to identify him-or herself when they wanted to ask a question. In a room as huge as that, it helped the moderators spot them.
The first panel was on the colony ships themselves. Between themselves, engineers tended to talk in a language that laymen found it difficult to follow, but like the astronomers, the techs employed a public relations director to translate for them. Graphic after graphic followed, showing the living quarters aboard the ships. They were enormous vessels, about half the length of the Verley platform. The graphics on the gigantic retina screen behind them spun in and out, showing an exploded view of the interior in detail.
All three ships employed the same drive system that had been created to boost the Landis probes through the wormholes. Matthew Rotundo and Matthew Kressel, two slender men, one dark-haired and one fair-haired, inventors of the Matt-R/Anti-Matt-R™ engines, avidly fielded questions about their acceleration system, power sources and plant shielding. The Suma ships also featured an emergency drive, the Wasserman “Ruby Slippers” runway system that laid out a series of diborene pellets in space to give the starships the power they needed to attain acceleration to leave orbit in case of trouble. The “Ruby Slippers” drive was intended to be used in future to return cargo ships, which would be built in the colonies, to Earth on a semi-regular basis once the settlements had been well established.
Doug almost felt that to have the astronomers’ panel after the tech panel was anticlimactic, but the crowd grew even larger as he and his staff took their places on the dais.
Conrad got there first, sliding into the center seat until he was told to move by a member of the convention staff, a dark-haired woman in her fifties, who pointed at Doug. Very grudgingly, Conrad rose. Doug took the middle position. Conrad deliberately plunked down beside him, daring the T-shirted organizer to shift him again. The woman shrugged and swapped the name plates. Tiffany, Jake, Christie, Amir and Farah joined them. Christie sat as far from Conrad as she could. The dark-haired woman brought them pitchers of water and bowls containing small snacks. Doug spotted Rob down in the front row among the reporters and their cameras. Director McDonald introduced them, and turned the floor over to Doug.
“I’d like to thank everyone for coming today,” Doug began, only glancing down now and again at his notes. “We’re taking the next step toward the stars. I’ve been looking up at them all my life, but now we’re sending people out to live among them. The Verley staff is proud to have been a part of that.”
He warmed to his topic, finding the words he had so carefully crafted coming easily to his memory. He described the early days of the project, how the platform had come to be constructed, and how the astronomers had formed a community in space.
“I’ll let everybody on the panel tell us about their work,” he said. “Thank you.” He sat down to loud applause, and grabbed his water glass.
Amir at the far end of the table, started off the discussion. His field was interstellar radiation. Doug had read his papers, and admired how well he explained the perils of travelers once they were outside Earth’s protective atmosphere. A bunch of audience lights went on, showing they had questions for him. Doug called on a few, then went on to Christie.
“My field of study is exoplanets,” she began. “I’ve been on the Verley platform since it became operational. Some of my observations have added to the data that ATSA used to choose the systems that we will colonize.”
“You’re pulling them out of your crystal ball!” bellowed a man holding a blue light up above his head. Christie hesitated.
Doug leaned into the microphone before him.
“We’re not taking questions yet, sir.”
“Why not?” a woman with a red light just behind Rob shouted. “I read that the whole Verley project is mumbo-jumbo! It’s all fake, like the moon landing!”
Doug glanced to his left. Conrad was positively triumphant. These people had to have been plants of his.
“I’m sorry, but what did you hear that led you to believe that?” Doug asked, with a friendly smile at the woman. “There are hundreds of scientists working on the settlement project. Why concentrate on what Dr. Yant did?”
“She practices spectromancy! That’s not science,” said a man with a green light. “How does it work? Do you use a telescope, or do you see them in your head?”
“She’s a fake scientist! They’re sending astronauts out into nothing!”
“All right!” Christie shouted, her face red. Doug sent a glance of worry toward Farah and Tiffany, but they signed back that they had it under control. She pounded her palm on the table for quiet. “All right! I guess my secret’s out! I couldn’t have kept it much longer anyhow.”
“Secret?” Doug asked.
“That she’s been stealing other people’s research and making it look like hers,” Conrad boomed into his mike.
“No,” Christie said, with a little smile. “That’s not it at all. Dr. Barlow, I assume you didn’t have time to read my paper on rotational unmixing and overlapping imaging data? Every time a shuttle arrived or departed from the Verley, I found an unusual phenomenon: a burst of several highly accurate scans, all focusing on the same star. I guess you threw out that data, but I kept it, and it allowed me to have
this breakthrough. And that was what enabled me to scientifically draw my original research to find that these planets are viable for human settlement. Both are centuries-old techniques, but sometimes the old ways are not bad.”
“Exactly,” said Jake. “I’ve run the data myself. I saw it.”
Tiffany nodded. “I confirmed her hypotheses, too. It’s all there.”
Doug turned to look Conrad full in the face. “Don’t they use this technique in X-ray astronomy as well? We can always send you the material so you can be brought up to date.”
“Did you have any further questions, Dr. Barlow?” Christie asked, innocently.
The room fell absolutely silent. None of the thousands of people in the room made a sound. All eyes turned to Conrad Barlow. He stared down at his hands without even blinking.
When the silence became overwhelming, Christie bent over her mike and smiled at the audience. “But Dr. Barlow did me a favor by creating a public awareness of spectromancy. And now that we have established the scientific basis of the work I have been doing, let’s talk about something fun.”
She put a hand down on her tablet. Brilliant colors erupted behind them. Doug turned to see.
On the retina screen, a rectangular graphic shimmered into being. Doug recognized the rainbow effect as a reading from a spectrograph, probably the image of the element neon. Across the center was a single word: Spectromancy. It looked like a book cover. Doug grinned. It was a book cover. In just a few hours, Christie had put one together. And he bet that she had the whole pseudoscience worked out.
“I wanted to wait until the ships actually launched before I published this,” Christie went on, “but Dr. Barlow made me jump the gun. I believe in giving to science, not living off it. Just because I’m good at this doesn’t mean I am bad at my profession. Astronomy is my life. Fortune-telling is my hobby, and a lucrative one it is, too.” Guffaws echoed throughout the room. Beside him, Conrad squirmed, and Doug enjoyed his discomfiture. “Director McDonald, I apologize for interrupting a science conference with a commercial message, but I would like to show you a few details from my next book. We’re all so excited about the colonization project that I came up with a new form of divination.
“Spectrographs are used by astronomers for determining the composition of stars many light years away. Each element presents its own color pattern. It can work on human beings, too.”
A few technicians wearing Turzillo Labs jumpsuits pushed rolling carts into the room.
“Can I have a volunteer?” Christie asked. Dozens of hands shot up. She stood up and walked off the dais. One of the stage hands hurried to hand her a wireless mike. Christie picked a man from the second row, who rushed forward, cheeks red. Christie picked up a scanner and passed it down the length of his body. Immediately, the graphic on the retina screen was replaced by a rainbow row of colored bars, some more intense than others. She turned to study it. “That’s very interesting. You have some hidden talents that you ought to investigate. Here’s the analysis of your reading.” The retina screen split, showing a page of text. Doug suspected the fortune was very quickly adapted from “Your luck today, Aries, will be …”
It didn’t matter what it said. Everyone loved the idea of a personalized reading. The audience erupted in cheers, followed by a sea of hands and lights all waving for attention. They wanted their turn.
“This isn’t serious science,” Director McDonald said.
“No, ma’am,” Christie said, confidently. “It’s all in good fun. And everyone attending the conference will get a free reading. But it’s time for me to hand the microphone to Professor Farah Mendlesohn.” Christie handed the mike back to the staff member and mounted the stage steps. She sat down between Amir and Farah.
“What about the exoplanets?” Conrad’s shill in the audience bellowed.
“Exactly as all our colleagues have determined,” Farah said. “ATSA would never risk the lives of human beings on something that has not been rigorously investigated. The images from each of the probes, plus all the other data, are there for you to download from the ATSA website. You can get a good look at humankind’s new homes. Someday many of you will be out there.”
Conrad rose and scurried down the other side of the stage. He vanished into the crowd. Doug was happy to see him go. It was too much to hope that he would resign from the Verley project. He would probably go on glowering at everyone, but Doug doubted he would ever harass anyone. He did hope that Conrad would get funding for the remote telescope beyond Mars. Then they’d never have to deal with him again.
When the astronomers’ time was up, they ceded the panel to the three colony ship captains and their support personnel. Rob met Doug at the bottom of the stairs.
“She handled it well,” Rob said. “The project’s back on track, and Christie’s going to make a billion dollars. She earned it.”
“I almost had tears in my eyes,” Doug said.
Rob grinned. “Me, too. One day, I’m going to make a movie about all this.”
“Wait for it,” Doug advised him. He held out his tablet computer. “I just got word from the grad students still on the Verley. Another Landis probe just came back through the wormhole. We got another positive.”
“Another one of hers?” Rob asked, his blue eyes wide.
“Yes,” Doug said. “I hate to say it, but maybe there’s something to be said for crystal balls. She really does see things we don’t.”
***
About the Authors
Jody Lynn Nye
Jody Lynn Nye lists her main career activity as “spoiling cats.” When not engaged upon this worthy occupation, she writes fantasy and science fiction books and short stories.
Before breaking away from gainful employment to write full time, Jody worked as a file clerk, bookkeeper at a small publishing house, freelance journalist, and photographer, accounting assistant and costume maker. For four years, she was on the technical operations staff of a local Chicago television station, ending as Technical Operations Manager.
Since 1987 she has published 45 books and more than 110 short stories. Although she is best known as a collaborator with other notable authors such as Anne McCaffrey (the Ship Who series, the Dinosaur Planet series), Robert Asprin (Dragons and the Myth-Adventures), John Ringo (Clan of the Claw) and Piers Anthony, Jody has numerous solo books to her credit, mostly fantasy and science fiction with a humorous bent. Her newest book is Fortunes of the Imperium (Baen Books), the second of the Lord Thomas Kinago books, which she describes as “Jeeves and Wooster in space.” Over the last twenty-five years or so, Jody has taught in numerous writing workshops and speaks at schools and libraries, and teaches the two-day writers’ workshop at DragonCon in Atlanta. When not writing, she enjoys baking, calligraphy, travel, photography and, of course, reading.
Jody lives in the northwest suburbs of Chicago with her husband, Bill Fawcett, and Jeremy, their cat.
jodylynnnye.com
Kevin R. Grazier, PhD
Kevin R. Grazier, PhD. is currently the science advisor on TNT’s Falling Skies, Syfy’s Defiance, and the blockbuster film Gravity. He previously served as science advisor on Eureka, the Peabody-award-winning Battlestar Galactica, and several other series. He was the co-author of The Science of Battlestar Galactica, and editor/contributing author of Hollywood Chemistry: When Science Met Entertainment.
Grazier is a recovering rocket scientist, and spent 15 years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Cassini/Huygens Mission to Saturn and Titan. Still an active researcher, his research areas are numerical method development and long-term large-scale computer simulations of Solar System dynamics, evolution, and chaos.
Dr. Grazier also teaches classes in basic astronomy, planetary science, cosmology, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the science of science fiction, at UCLA, and Santa Monica College. He also serves on multiple NASA educational product review panels.
In 2001 Dr. Grazier was named the first-ever honorary chairperson for Oakl
and University’s “Week of Champions” (homecoming) celebration, eight years later he won OU’s Odyssey Award given to the alumni whose life most typifies the university’s motto: To Seek Virtue and Knowledge, and in 2013 he was named an “Outstanding Alumnus” by the Purdue University Department of Computer Sciences.
Geoffrey A. Landis
Geoffrey A. Landis is a physicist and a SF writer. He has won the Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon awards for his fiction, and in his day job, works at the NASA John Glenn Research Center on developing advanced technologies for space missions. He was a guest lecturer at Launch Pad in 2012.
Matthew Kressel
Matthew Kressel’s fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, Electric Velocipede, Apex Magazine, the anthologies After, Naked City, The People of the Book, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk, and other markets. He was a World Fantasy Award finalist in the category of Special Award, Non-Professional for his magazine Sybil’s Garage and his publishing venture, Senses Five Press. With Senses Five Press he published Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, which won the World Fantasy Award in 2008. For nearly a decade he has been a member of the Altered Fluid writing group. When he’s not learning Yiddish or playing the trumpet, he co-curates the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series beside Ellen Datlow in Manhattan. His blog and website are at:
matthewkressel.net
Mike Brotherton, PhD
Mike Brotherton, PhD, is the author of the science fiction novels Star Dragon (2003) and Spider Star (2008), both from TOR Books, as well as a number of short stories. He’s a professor of astronomy at the University of Wyoming and investigates active galaxies using the Hubble Space Telescope and nearly every observatory that will give him time on their facilities. He is the founder of the NASA and National Science Foundation funded Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop for Writers, which brings a dozen award-winning professional writers to Wyoming every summer. He blogs about science and science fiction at:
Launch Pad Page 32
