Analog SFF, June 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Too much happened at once, the sequence unclear:

  —A sharp tug on Gabe's backpack.

  —Thad saying, “Wrong answer.”

  —A power alarm.

  —A second yank.

  —Helmet lights and HUD going dark.

  —A hard shove forward.

  Gabe twisted around. Earthlight showed Thad a good twenty feet away, receding. Just staring. And bulging from the mesh pouch of Thad's tool belt: two battery packs.

  Without power for his suit's heating elements, Gabe would freeze within minutes. Already the cold seeped into him, body and thoughts turning sluggish. He got his feet beneath him, even as he ripped lengths of tether from their reels. He leapt.

  His right foot slipped on loose gravel and he sailed far to the side.

  The shorter tether pulled him up short. Its yank started him spinning even as the tug started him back toward the surface. Too slowly. He took the maneuvering pistol from its holster—but it slipped from fingers already numb with cold. As he drifted down he managed to grip a rock outcropping.

  All the while, maintaining his distance, Thad watched. Stared.

  “Why?” Gabe screamed. Not that his radio worked without batteries. Not that his shout could cross the vacuum. “Why are you doing this?”

  Maybe his murderer read Gabe's lips. Whatever the reason, Thad shrugged.

  Gabe advanced. Thad retreated.

  As cold became all, as consciousness faded, the last thing Gabe saw was the waxing crescent Earth.

  * * * *

  Earth no longer seemed close enough to touch.

  “He just went nuts!” Thad said once more.

  With minor variations the words had become his mantra. First with Tiny, when he had called in from across Phoebe about the “accident.” Over and over with Bryce Lewis and Alan Childs after they joined Thad on the surface. And now hopefully for the last time, in the station's comm-gear-packed command center, with Lyman Hsu, the dour station chief.

  “Details, please.” Hsu rubbed his pencil-thin mustache as he spoke.

  Thad ignored the request. “You should have let me go with the other guys. You can't imagine what it was like.” I damn well hope you can't imagine it. He struggled to understand it.

  “You'd been outside long enough for one day. You know the rules.”

  Because their utility craft were little more than flying broomsticks: compressed-air bottles, saddles, and minimal controls mounted to latticework frames. A counterpressure suit was your only protection.

  “But I don't have to like the rules,” Thad said. Which, emphatically, he did not. What if he had overlooked something? Joining the rescue team might have given him a chance to cover his tracks.

  “Details,” Hsu prompted.

  “You heard Gabe switch to private channel two.” It had all come down to Gabe taking his cue, because everything on the public channel got recorded. Sooner or later, he would have figured out what Thad was building. Certainly the bullshit about Tiny and making a still for her would not bear scrutiny. That fable was all Thad could come up with on the spot, blather to occupy Gabe's mind until they got farther from the station. “When I linked in, Gabe was already mid-rant. He missed Jillian, unbearably. He knew—but couldn't explain how—that she was cheating on him. He loved her and needed her and couldn't bear for anyone else to be with her. He would show her. And then"—Thad paused dramatically—"he unclipped his tethers.”

  “And you . . . ?”

  “What do you think, Lyman? I tried to talk sense into him, damn it.”

  “And not a word of this reported to base.”

  “I didn't dare switch channels! There was no telling what Gabe might do if I wasn't on. If I didn't respond when he expected an answer.”

  “And he jumped anyway.”

  “As I keep telling you,” Thad said.

  He had never been much of a basketball player. On a good day, his vertical leap was two feet. On Phoebe, that was more than enough leg strength to vault two men and their gear past escape velocity. He had let go of the body, untethered, before coming to the end of his own fully unrolled tethers. After the ropes pulled him short with a jerk, Thad had watched the corpse recede into the darkness.

  Hsu tipped back his head, staring through the command-center dome. “He had second thoughts.”

  “What do you mean?” Thad asked.

  “Every indication is that Gabe froze to death. But when Tina and Lewis found Gabe, the suit heater was on. He must have been in late-stage hypothermia by then, half delirious. It's a marvel his suit still recognized his voice.” Hsu sighed. “By then it was too late.”

  The heaters kicked back on once Thad replaced the batteries. Not done till Gabe was unequivocally dead.

  “It's a shame,” Thad said, meaning it. Gabe was not a bad guy, only in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “A damn shame.”

  Silence stretched awkwardly. After a while Thad said, “It's been a hell of a day. I'd like to . . . hell, I don't know what.” Except that he knew damn well. He had to finish what Gabe had interrupted, and get everything stashed away. At least then the man would have died for a reason. “Something other than relive this disaster.”

  Hsu nodded. “Sounds like a good idea. Get some sleep.”

  “I will,” Thad said. And wondered if he could.

  * * * *

  CONVICTION

  2023

  Monday, April 10

  Marcus Judson slipped into the back of the downtown Baltimore hotel ballroom more than an hour late. Though the room was packed, it did not seem like anyone was having a ball. Certainly not his colleagues huddled at the speakers’ table at the opposite end of the room.

  He surveilled from behind a freestanding sign that read The Power of Powersats: a Town Meeting. From the way Jeff Robbins, one of the EPA representatives on the dais, blotted his face with his handkerchief, the townsfolk bore, however metaphorically, torches and pitchforks.

  The PowerHolo orientation spiel (of which Marcus was thoroughly sick, after many such gatherings) ran about thirty minutes. That meant the Q&A session had just begun. It did not bode well to find Jeff already wound so tight. Plenty of head-in-the-sand types in the crowd, then. Damned Luddites.

  Marcus hated being such a cynic—but he was more this way every day.

  This could have been any public meeting room anywhere. High ceiling. Cheap carpet and cloth-covered walls to muffle the audience noises. Sidewalls comprised of narrow segments that, folded into accordion pleats, would open into other, similar rooms for additional space. Recessed ceiling lights. Amplifier and loudspeakers deployed across the foot of the dais. Holo projection console.

  Men and women filled the rows of chairs, and yet more people had queued up in the aisles for turns at the audience microphones. At the right-hand mike, a tall, balding man, his sleeves rolled up, was gesturing grandly. Marcus had arrived too late to catch the man's point. If he had a point. They often didn't.

  “. . . would be a better use of public land,” the balding man finally concluded.

  “Thank you for your comment,” Lisa Jackson began. As she—as all the panelists—had been trained. “We agree that parks are important. That said, so is a sufficiency of electrical power. We at the Department of the Interior must consider both.”

  The novelty of powersat town meetings was long past; the room's lone tripod-mounted camera might feed only the municipal Internet server. With no media visible the protocol would have been the same, because half the audience sat holding comps or phones or datasheets. Any slip-up would be on YouTube within minutes. So all panelists were trained in changing the subject. Better a non-answer than an impolitic one.

  If inconvenient questions were to be evaded, what was the point? Why hold these town meetings at all? Marcus had asked, and his question, evidently, was also impolitic. “It's policy,” a long-ago boss had once told Marcus in similar circumstances. “It doesn't have to make sense.”

  But coaching
by a NASA spin doctor was not what had made Marcus a cynic.

  He half listened, half pondered how and when to move to the front of the room. On the dais, behind the long, skinny table and its billowing, ruffled skirt, sat eight chairs: two places each for Interior, Energy, the EPA, and NASA. The lone unoccupied seat was Marcus's.

  With Lisa expounding from five chairs away from the empty seat, this seemed as good a time as any for Marcus to claim his spot.

  He edged through the least crowded aisle, murmuring apologies as he went, answering dirty looks by tapping the NASA ID badge clipped to his suit lapel. I'm with the government. I really am here to help.

  Once through the crowd, he slid into the empty chair at the speakers’ table.

  Ellen Tanaka, NASA program manager for the powersat—and Marcus's boss—looked weary. They all did. Her eyes, too myopic for LASIK, were owllike behind thick, round lenses. She covered her mike with a hand. “Good of you to join us,” she whispered.

  That he had texted ahead changed nothing. Everyone had made the drive that morning from somewhere in metro DC. She would not want to hear about the rain, the line at the gas station, or signals flashing red throughout Fairfax County because the traffic management system had crashed or been hacked. He would not have, either.

  “Car trouble,” he mouthed. “Sorry.”

  Lisa was still answering the balding man. “We'll be using property already dedicated to power generation, in this case for ground-based solar power. In particular, we'll retrofit selected solar farms with arrays of short antennas suited to receiving power downlinks. Land recycling, if you will—very environmentally correct. The antennas will be vertical, scarcely blocking any sunlight to the solar cells on the ground. So, you see, the powersat demonstration does not preempt any parkland.”

  “But that land shouldn't be wasted on—”

  “Thank you for your comment,” Ellen interrupted. “I'm afraid that's all the time we have with so many others still waiting.” She pointed to the head of another line, where a middle-aged woman, rail thin, her face tanned and leathery, clutched a folded sheet of paper. The woman wore the judgmental expression of a Resetter. “Yes, ma'am?”

  Marcus and Ellen took turns moderating these meetings, because NASA's part of the solar-power-satellite project drew the fewest questions. Public comments mostly concerned public safety, energy policy, and land use. Never mind, Marcus thought, that Powersat One, the full-scale demo system nearing completion, would be the largest structure ever built. Or that NASA was constructing PS-1 in space, where neither night nor weather could interrupt the sunlight streaming onto its solar cells.

  But all that dependable—and desperately needed—solar energy became useful only when it reached the ground. And once brought to Earth, the power had to be distributed far and wide. Terrestrial solar farms already had connections to the national power grid. Siting the downlink antennas amid the ground-based solar farms just made sense.

  To Marcus, anyway.

  “About that downlink,” the thin woman began, frowning. “'Downlink’ sounds like an Internet connection, and that's more than a little disingenuous. Your downlink is nothing so benign. You're talking about microwaves. A gigawatt or so of microwaves. If you turn on that satellite, it'll roast anyone unlucky enough to encounter the power beam.”

  “No, it won't,” someone muttered from down the table—and a mic picked it up.

  Marcus leaned forward to see who had gone off-script. Apparently Brad Kaminski, from DOE. He was clutching his mike stand, and a bit red in the face.

  “Um, thank you for your comment,” Brad backtracked. “Yes, downlinks from the power satellite will use microwaves. That's for a good reason: Earth's atmosphere is transparent to microwaves. By beaming microwaves, we can harvest most of the power on the ground.

  “But as for safety, ma'am, there is no cause for concern. The beam is strongest at its center. By the edge—”

  “How strong?” someone in the crowd hollered.

  “About like direct, overhead sunlight,” Brad said. “By the edge of the—”

  “Like a second sun beating down on you,” the woman at the mike said. “That should be healthy.”

  Brad persisted. “By the edge of the collection area, a zone miles across, the beam has attenuated to well within public safety standards.”

  The woman laughed humorlessly. “You expect the birds to mind your fences?”

  From deep within the crowd, a snort. “Lady, do you have any idea how many birds get chopped up by wind generators?”

  “Forget the damned birds!” someone shouted back from across the ballroom. “Just keep the lights on and my car charged.”

  Taunts and insults erupted, on every side of the issue. Cameras big and small pointed to memorialize the chaos. It took Ellen several minutes to restore order—

  In order that more decorous criticisms could resume. That powersats were: unsafe, unnecessary, or poor investments. That if only everyone conserved, instead of wasting resources on foolishly audacious projects, it would be better for the United States and the entire Earth, too. That the country could extract additional energy from the tides, or build more wind farms, or re-shingle more roofs with solar cells, or grow more biomass, or . . . do anything other than the powersat project.

  And from the opposite end of the opinion spectrum: That the wind did not always blow when people need power. That—duh!—the Sun did not shine at night or do much for snow-covered roofs. That sunlight beating down on Arizona did nothing for New England. That people shrieking “energy sprawl” against a few square miles to be used for East Coast microwave downlinks fooled no one by suggesting new high-voltage power lines could be built across the continent from solar farms in the southwestern deserts. That the NIMBYs had even less credibility proposing huge new storage systems to save solar power for exploitation at night. And that if the tree-huggers did not wise up, civilization would grind to a halt. Shivering in the dark.

  Since the Crudetastrophe, oil was scarce and painfully expensive. That did not make gasoline any less essential. There simply was not enough electrical power generation to cope with the hurried—and ongoing—switchover to plug-in cars; if there had been, the overburdened power grid could not reliably distribute the added load. Marcus did not bring up any of that. No one on the panel did. They were not permitted to say anything verging on politics, geo- or other.

  Do it all, Marcus wanted to shout, but that was yet another truth no one on the panel was permitted to speak. Any other means of power generator, distribution, or conservation was someone else's project.

  From time to time it was his turn to field a harangue. He dutifully thanked whomever for their comment and, all too often, parroted some preapproved, eminently inoffensive platitude. And began to wonder if there was any way he could not have become cynical.

  If he hadn't been already.

  A young woman in a Johns Hopkins sweatshirt reached the front of a comment line. An engineering student, Marcus suspected, because she asked about the radiation environment in space gradually degrading solar cells. When he thanked her for the question, he really meant it. He was an engineer too.

  He talked about radiation hardening, on-orbit repair methods, and opportunities for in-space remanufacturing. He reviewed the deleterious effects of weather on terrestrial solar cells. This, finally, was a question he could answer without breaking protocol—not to mention an interesting topic—and he pretended not to notice his boss's sidelong glances until she tap-tapped her mike to cut him off. It was almost noon and they were, “regrettably nearly out of time.”

  Two more danced-around questions and the ordeal was over. Until two days hence, in another city. Marcus forgot which, and it hardly mattered.

  This was no way to save a country.

  Long after Marcus and his colleagues had collected their things and were ready to hit the road, many of their audience still milled about, arguing in animated clumps. The stragglers showed no sign of clearing the aisles
.

  The wall behind the dais had two camouflaged service doors. Marcus opened one a few inches and peeked out. He found the service hallway empty and, apart from the distant, muffled clatter of pots and pans, quiet. “Shall we?” he suggested to his colleagues.

  No one argued.

  In the austere corridor, her shoes clicking on the tile floor, Ellen limped along beside Marcus. She had not quite recovered from a skiing accident the previous winter. Ellen was tall to begin with; in heels, she was almost his height. “Not fun, Marcus, but we need public support. It's going to be a big change.”

  “Understood,” he said. And still a waste of their time.

  “Not everything can be as fascinating as radiation-hardening techniques for solar cells.” With a laugh, she changed the subject. “What's the car problem?”

  “The circuit breaker in my garage tripped overnight.” The overtaxed grid, sagging and surging, was beyond anyone's ability to predict—and with every new electric car on the street the load became a little greater, a bit more mobile, and that much less predictable. “The breaker must have popped right after I got home and plugged in the car, because I had about zero charge this morning.”

  “And you had to buy gas? Ouch. Well, you must have had ration credits left. That's something.”

  Double doors swung open into the service corridor, the kitchen noises swelling, and waiters rushed toward them bearing lunch trays. Marcus stepped aside.

  Twenty bucks and change per gallon. That ridiculous line at the pump. Ration credits he had been saving for a vacation. None of it bore thinking about.

  “And Marcus . . .”

  The pregnant pause. Her charcoal-gray power suit. Heels. She was way overdressed for the morning's public flogging. “Where are you off to, boss, and what do you need me to cover for you?”

  She grinned. “Clearly we've worked together too long. The administrator called last night. He wants a program update today. Hence, you'll be taking my place at this afternoon's interagency coordination session. I'll mail the minutes from the last session.”