by Robert Graf
Wrapped in a bathrobe, she selected Ian's private code on her phone and tapped it. The annoying repetitive tone filled her ear. Two hours difference, well too bad
Ian, sounding tired, answered. No visual. "Yes?"
"It's Ann, I'm here." She'd run out of patience.
"Right. Wait one." Brief silence. "Call this code, and tell whoever answers who you are. They'll take it from there." He rattled off a link code that she copied onto the convenient notepad.
She hated being kept in the dark. "Who am I calling?"
"NASA's Assistant Director Gordon Toffler. This is his direct link; he’s expecting you."
"Have you heard from Jon?"
"No, now let me go back to sleep." The connection ended.
“Piss on you, too.” She tapped in the number.
A middle-aged man’s face topped with thinning gray hair snapped into view. “Toffler," a raspy voice answered.
"This is Dr. Ann Grey. I'm here, so what do I do?"
"Where are you staying?"
"The Marriott at Ellington Airport."
"I'll have a car sent around. Be in the lobby in half an hour."
She was getting annoyed at being ordered about. That left no time for breakfast. The drive to Johnson Space Center took a bare fifteen minutes despite being the middle of the commute. The driver turned into a full parking lot and stopped before a sprawling brown structure—Building 30 according to the sign.
"Here we are, Dr. Grey, Mission Control. You can leave your bag in the car while I get you through formalities. Shouldn't be more than a half hour or so."
Ann got out and studied the structure. So this was the famous building where US space missions had been directed from. She’d expected something more impressive.
"This way, Dr. Grey," her driver said, indicating a door.
She followed the driver into the building and across a lobby to a desk manned by Air Force guards.
"Formalities" she discovered meant having her purse searched, answering more personal questions than she cared to, getting fingerprinted, having a retina scan, and a passport photograph taken. In the end she had a badge with her picture and personal information on a ribbon to hang around her neck. “NEVER take it off when in the building,” a guard told her.
Waiting for her was a short man with thinning gray hair, in his forties, wearing a sport coat, blue shirt, dark tie, and tan trousers.
"Dr. Grey, I'm Gordon Toffler, Director of NASA's Office of Safety, Reliability and Quality Assurance." He smiled, holding out his hand. Ann shook it. "I know, that's a mouthful. Informally it’s the Safety Office. We need to get you to FCR so if you would follow me?"
Ann’s stomach growled. That did it; she’d had all she could stand. "Mr. Toffler, I haven't eaten, and I want an explanation before I do anything."
He stopped and turned. "Oh, my, I'm sorry. There's a cafeteria down the hall."
The cafeteria was crowded and eerily quiet, not even muted conversation. Toffler steered her to the front of the line. "I'll be over there," he said, pointing to a table against the wall.
Ann ignored the annoyed glances and filled a plate with eggs and toast and poured a cup of coffee. She carried her tray over to Toffler’s table, sat and began eating. His posture and expression radiated impatience, but that was his problem. She finished her coffee. "Thank you. I'm not at my best without food."
"Aren't we all. Things are rather hectic at the moment. The Jove Explorer has experienced a catastrophic accident. Its engines have failed, and it can only communicate using your EntCom system."
"Oh, my God. Was anyone hurt?"
"Yes," he answered, without elaborating. "Pratt and Whitney has a group here, and we need you here in case of any issues with your system."
What to say? They've got real problems. "I'll do my best; now I need to call my office."
He frowned. "I'd prefer you wait. We'll make an official announcement later this morning. You can imagine the media frenzy that's going to occur. Are you finished?" he asked, standing.
"Yes." She followed him down the hall and through another set of doors into a cavernous room. Huge screens across the front wall dominated the room, reminding her of a multiscreen movie theater. The room was filled with rows of flat screens, manned by men and women talking quietly into headsets, creating a background murmur. Like the cafeteria she sensed a strained, brittle atmosphere.
Toffler stopped. "Welcome to the Flight Control Room or FCR as it's known." He gestured towards the rows of technicians focused on their computer screens. "Each of these stations is responsible for one aspect of the system. You'll be involved with the Spacecraft Communicator or CAPCOM. Your EntCom is connected to it in another room."
Ann was overwhelmed. She'd seen news clips of this room, but being here was altogether different. She pointed to the wall-size screens; one showed bright specks against a black background. One speck was singled out by a yellow circle. "What's that?"
Toffler's expression turned grim. "Jove Explorer in real time. It's from a remote-controlled telescope on the moon's far side. When it can't track anymore we switch to a satellite."
For the first time the immensity of space and her infinitesimal place in it came crashing down on her. "How far is it?"
"About 200 million kilometers, nearing the asteroid belt." He motioned for her to follow him. "Let's get you introduced to CAPCOM."
CAPCOM turned out to be a black woman in her fifties, wearing a light blue business skirt and jacket with matching blouse. Ann felt underdressed in her pants and sweater. She cursed Ian for not briefing her on what to expect.
"Jeanette Strang, this is Dr. Grey from Global Communication."
"Pleased to meet, you," the woman said, extending her hand. "I've met your husband, but haven't seen him for a couple days."
Ann shook it. "Pleasure's mine, and please call me Ann. Jon had another obligation."
"Dr. Grey, I'll leave you with Jeanette." With that, Toffler left.
Ann turned her attention to Jeanette. "Forgive, me, just what do you want me to do? No one briefed me."
Jeanette answered with a strained smile. "Not surprising. Around here the attitude is if you're supposed to know something you do, if you're not you don't."
Ann digested that tidbit. "Tell me what to do."
"Have a seat. CAPCOM controls communications with Jove Explorer. Usually that means long delays by radio, eleven minutes one way now. But with your system it's real time. I have to tell you it's amazing. I haven't gotten over how different and wonderful that is." She spoke into her headset. "Yes, Flight, she's here." She turned to Ann, "The Flight Director checking up on me."
"The flight crew is assessing damage, so I expect many long transmissions in the next few hours." She stopped smiling. "And, God willing, the engine people can figure out a fix."
Ann settled into the chair next to Jeanette. She didn't know how to ask. There was no polite way, so she blundered ahead. "Do you know what happened?"
Jeanette regarded her with a bleak expression. "No point in trying to keep anything from you. The engines died after an electromagnetic field generator failed. The engineer tech was killed. They can't use radio communication as that draws too much power from the backup system. That’s dedicated to life support."
Ann steeled herself for a long day and maybe night. "May I ask what you think of the EntCom?"
"As I said, it's fantastic; real time communication was something from movies." She hesitated. "Can you tell me why there's only text?"
Ann had asked the same question when Global created the original design. "Understand, I'm not an engineer, I'm one of the physicists who invented quantum communication. Anyway, the engineers who built the commercial version told me voice capability was too complicated and would have to wait for later versions."
A message appeared on Jeanette's tablet. "Here we go, Dr. Grey." She spoke into her headset, "Flight, incoming."
Ann watched in fascination as the message scrolled up the scree
n. She picked out a few technical terms — containment, hydrogen feed rupture; the rest was engineering jargon she didn't understand. The message went on for several minutes before ending.
Jeanette sent "Message received."
"What happens now?" Ann asked.
"This will go to the Pratt and Whitney people. They'll dissect it and advise Flight, who will tell me what to send back."
Translated, we wait. "Where's the lady's room?"
Jeanette pointed to the doors she'd entered from. "Back out there, turn right, two doors down. Can't miss it."
When Ann returned, Jeanette was speaking into her headset. Ann sat and studied the huge screen showing the Explorer's position. Nothing appeared to have changed. The distances were so enormous nothing short of a very large change would register.
"Engineer folk have some questions for the ship. This screen," she pointed to the second display, "will show their message. I'll send it, and then we wait some more."
Maybe she could be of some use. "May I see the message before you send it?"
Jeanette squinted at her. "Why?"
"You must be aware that some messages cause the EntComs problems. I've been trying to understand why that is and found a few empirical procedures that increase the chance of success."
Jeanette regarded her warily. "I was told not to discuss that with anyone, but you're not just anyone, are you? Sure, why not?" She glanced back at the screen as lines of text began scrolling across. "Yup, here it comes.” She watched until it finished. "Your turn."
Ann studied the screen. Most of the message consisted of questions, so no problem. One line caught her eye: Moving the feeder line to socket A will bypass part of the rupture. She highlighted it. "That's a problem."
Jeanette read the highlighted text. "You've got to be kidding."
How could Ann impress her that grammar mattered? "Please understand something. I truly have no idea why some sentences cause problems, but I have bitter experience that they do."
Jeanette spoke into her headset. "Flight, Dr. Grey wants to change part of the message." She listened a moment, then took off the headset and handed it to Ann. "You tell him."
Ann put on the headset. "Hello?"
"Dr. Grey, explain what you want to do and why."
You're wasting time she wanted to yell. Instead she repeated what she told CAPCOM. "So I want to change the line into an instruction and remove 'will'. If the message failed, you'd have no idea why."
"Agreed, change it."
Ann returned the headset to Jeanette who donned it and spoke to Flight. Ann edited the offending entry to, "Move the feeder line to socket A to bypass part of the rupture." Jeanette copied the message and pasted it to the EntCom console. While Jeanette was busy Ann pulled her tablet from her purse, booted it and brought up her 'rules':
Fact checking guidelines
1. No lies/non-truths in past relative to entanglement date
2. Predictions, undetermined events, such as sports, weather, etc. OK
3. Parser evaluates each message for past, present or future tense. Only Past
Tested. Implies true or false in Present or future tenses do not fail whether
true or not
4. Questions and answers OK
5. Languages ? English, German, and...
6. Non-messages, i.e. random characters OK
Should she show Jeanette? Isaac's boss was right, secrecy didn't matter anymore.
"Finished," Jeanette announce, scrolling back through the message. "Looks good." She tapped Send; the message vanished, replaced by Acknowledged. "Now we wait."
"Jeanette, I want to show you something." Ann pointed to her tablet. "See that list?"
Jeanette studied the screen. "Yes," she replied with a frown.
"That's what I've found out about why messages fail."
"Dear God in heaven! Our chief scientist was running some tests the other day but didn't see fit to tell us what he'd found." She shook her head. "This can't be real, it's impossible."
It's all too real Ann wanted to say, real enough people have been killed over it. NASA knew about the guards, but not Hooper or Doug. Should she tell the Assistant Director?
"I wish it weren't true. Every test I've been able to devise supports that list."
Jeanette’s eyes widened. "You shouldn't have shown that to me."
Here we go again. "Nonsense. If not you, then who? You're the contact person. You've got to make instant decisions, and without information maybe the wrong ones."
"Dr. Grey, you frighten me."
Ann felt like shaking her. That was ridiculous. "It's Ann. Right now the important thing is to get the ship fixed, right?"
"Yes, doctor, I mean, Ann, you're right, still..." She stared at the list, mesmerized. "Can I copy this?"
"Of course. Pass it to whoever needs to see it." She’d just opened Pandora's Box. What will Ian think? It didn't matter anymore.
"I sent it to Flight; he gets paid the big bucks."
Ann leaned back in her chair, gonna be a long day. Her gaze returned to the huge screen showing Jove Explorer's location. Not another Challenger, she prayed.
"Dr. Grey, would you come with me, please?"
Ann jerked upright. She'd been dozing and hadn't sensed Toffler approach. She checked her watch, half an hour since Jeanette sent her list. That was fast. She braced for the inevitable interrogation.
"Sure," she said, getting up.
"Our Associate Administrator of Science, Dr. Morito, wishes to speak with you about that list you gave CAPCOM." He glanced at her with an unreadable expression. "It caused quite a stir."
Ann didn't reply.
They stopped before a door marked Conference Room. "Here we are," he announced, opening it.
Ann stepped into a pale blue room containing a single long table with a flat screen, a tray with bottled water, and glasses. Empty chairs lined both sides. One chair was occupied by a rotund, spectacled man. Despite thick black hair she guessed he was in his late sixties.
He stood and offered his hand. "Dr. Grey, I'm Joseph Morito. I'm very pleased to meet you."
He didn’t appear Japanese. Ann shook his hand. "Likewise, Doctor."
"Please, have a chair. May I get you water of coffee or..."
"Water is fine," Ann replied and sat. Toffler sat across from her. She took the proffered bottle, poured a half glass and drank. The cool water tasted wonderful.
Time to quit playing around. "I believe my husband spoke with you."
"Yes. must say that was a bombshell he dropped on us." He smiled ruefully. "We knew something was peculiar with the EntCom's behavior. At first we didn't believe a word of his explanation; in fact we suspected a corporate cover-up. But upon further reflection, couldn't figure out what. So we ran some rudimentary tests, and to our astonishment found that he told the truth." His smile vanished. "Then this terrible accident and here we are." He glanced down at a sheet of paper. "Yes, indeed."
Toffler interrupted. "Before you two get into technicalities, why did you give that list to CAPCOM."
That’s a strange question. Play it straight. "She needs to know what might occur and how to respond. A misunderstood transmission might take too long to parse to find the offending line; even then you might not know what to do. What if it were some time-critical information?" She tried to project confidence. "It seemed like the right thing to do."
He regarded her with a faint smile. "Our Flight Director agrees with you. We were impressed by how well the EntCom survived that lab explosion. What a terrible tragedy. Did anyone figure out what happened?"
They didn't know? Jon didn't tell them? "It was deliberate. Someone detonated a remote bomb in a van parked next to my lab. The FBI is investigating."
Both men's expressions registered shock. "My God," Morito gasped, turning to Toffler. "Could that happen here?"
Toffler shook his head. "No way. Short of a missile strike or aerial bombardment, this place is secure. I will inform my security people wha
t you’ve told me."
"My turn. What is the status of the ship? I've seen a few messages yet don't have a grasp on how things stand."
Toffler frowned. "There's no reason you shouldn't know, though we've delayed the news conference until tomorrow. The Pratt Whitney engineers think there's a way to jury-rig one of the engines. I don't know the details, though I'm hopeful."
"That's great news."
"You realize that you've made yourself indispensable? Even with your list, Flight insists you review every message. You may not get much sleep."
She hadn't thought it through, just gone with her instinct. "I'll do my best."
Toffler got up. "I've other commitments, please don't keep Dr. Grey too long," he said and left, shutting the door behind him.
Morito cleared his throat "Could you tell me how this works or is that a corporate secret?"
She laughed. "I haven't the foggiest. Fact checking is a complete shock to me. It throws everything I knew about quantum mechanics out the window. You have any ideas? You're the second person in the world to test it." She didn't mention the Vatican.
His face registered surprise or was it disbelief. "You don't? I'm an astrobiologist by training. Unfortunately for the last few years I've been more administrator than scientist. I've been treating the EntCom like an unknown organism, trying to get it to react to stimuli to deduce its abilities. I admit to feeling very uneasy about it."
"An organism? That's very clever, something I'd never have considered, otherwise my approach is no different. I've been trying to understand what I call its grammar. The guts of the thing are two containers of entangled exotic matter, a gas. If you could observe the gas, it would resemble a cloud of tiny twinkling points analogous to Brownian motion, pure entropy. Introduce a suitable stress on the gas, and some molecules instantaneously change their quantum state with their entangled complements, producing a pattern at the other end that is picked up by electronics. That's the information part, the qubits, and reduces overall entropy of the system. It's not super luminal, it just appears that way."
Morito regarded her with a rueful expression. "I hear your words yet don't pretend to understand what they mean. I'll confess that when we evaluated your bid, I was against it. To me the idea was preposterous. Our consultant physicists agreed. Operations folk, which include the Flight Director, were intrigued enough to demand a demonstration. Well, you know how that went since you and your husband put it on."
