He’s Tom Kelly, after all.
And this might be the night.
He’s still listening, waiting.
MORE ADVENTURES ON OTHER PLANETS
Michael Cassutt
Emerson wrote, “The world is too much with us, night and noon.” That’s so true that, as the clever story that follows indicates, when we want to get away from it all, sometimes even going millions of miles from Earth, to the frozen surface of a hostile alien world, is not going nearly far enough . . .
As a print author, Michael Cassutt is mostly known for his incisive short work, but he has worked intensively in the television industry over the past few decades, where he is a major mover and shaker. He was co-executive producer for Showtime’s The Outer Limits – which won a CableAce Award for Best Dramatic Series – and also served in the same or similar capacities for series such as Eerie, Indiana and Strange Luck, as well as having worked as the story editor for Max Headroom, as a staff writer on The Twilight Zone, and having contributed scripts to Farscape, Stargate SG-1, among many other television series. He also contributes a regular column on science fiction in films and television to Science Fiction Weekly. His books include the novels The Star Country, Dragon Season, and Missing Man, the anthology Sacred Visions (co-edited with Andrew M. Greeley), and a biographical encyclopedia, Who’s Who in Space: the First 25 Years. He also collaborated with the late astronaut Deke Slayton on Slayton’s autobiography Deke! His most recent book is the historical thriller Red Moon.
THIS IS WHAT THEY used to call a cute meet, back when movies were made by people like Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder, when movies had plots and dialogue, when life and love had rules, back in the last century. A handsome officer in the Soviet embassy (does that tell you how long ago?) picks up the phone one day and hears a lilting female voice asking him if he can tell her, please, what is Lenin’s middle name. “It’s for my crossword puzzle.”
Affronted, the officer snaps, “To dignify that question would be an insult to the Soviet Union!” And slams down the phone.
But not before he hears a lovely laugh.
That evening the officer goes to the British Embassy for some reception, and hears that same laugh emerging from the oh so luscious mouth of an English woman who should probably be Audrey Hepburn. Smitten, the officer walks up to Miss Hepburn, bows, and says, “Ilyich.”
And so the story begins.
And so our story begins. Only –
Look, you’re going to have to be patient with me. Because the couple is not just a couple. It’s more of a quartet. And two of the individuals aren’t even people.
Picture the surface of Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter. It is midday, local time, but the sky is black: what little atmosphere Europa possesses is insufficient to scatter enough light to give it a color. The combination of ice, snow, and rock create a patchwork of white and gray, something like a chessboard with no straight lines.
Europa is tectonically active, about ten times as bouncy as any place on earth, so the landscape is marked by jagged upthrusts and creepy fissures known as cycloids.
But forget the landscape and the color of the sky. What really catches your attention is the striped ball that is Jupiter, looming overhead like a gigantic jack-o’-lantern. It actually seems to press down on the snowy landscape. What makes it a little worse is that since Europa is tide-locked, always keeping the same face toward its giant mother, if you happen to be working on that side of Europa, Jupiter is always there!
And so are several elements of the J2E2, the Joint Jupiter-Europan Expedition, three tiny rovers that have been operating on the icy plains for two years, scouting the site for the “permanent” Hoppa Station and erecting such necessary equipment as a shelter (even machines get cold on Europa), a radiothermal power plant, and the communications array.
On this particular day, rover element one, also known as “Earl,” is approximately seven kilometers north of Hoppa when he receives a query from a source in motion (his comm gear is sophisticated enough to detect a slight Doppler effect) for range-rate data.
Element Earl can’t see the source: his visual sensor is a hardy multi-spectral charged-couple device that is excellent for showing a view forward and all around. It lacks, however, a tilt mechanism that will let it see up.
Nor, given the priorities in his guidance system, can he presently provide range-rate data. In the burst of bits that made up rover-speak, Element Earl says, more or less, “I’m a Pathfinder-class rover element. You should be talking to the base unit at Hoppa Station.”
He would think no more about the contact, except that there is a message of sorts embedded in the acknowledgment that suggests . . . compatibility. More than seems to exist between the Dopplering radio source and the base unit at Hoppa, in any case.
The Dopplering source is, in fact, a series of follow-up J2E2 packages designed to conduct the search for life in the dark, frigid ocean under Europa’s icy crust.
All of these elements are wrapped inside a landing bag dropped from a mission bus launched from Earth two years after the initial bunch that included Element Earl and propelled Europa-ward by lightsail. The bus has burned into orbit around Europa, then waited for a command from La Jolla to separate the bag and its retro system.
The follow-up flight has been marred by software glitches, some of them due to undetected programming lapses back in the avionics lab in La Jolla, others to the assault of Jupiter’s magnetic field. After all, the chips are only hardened against electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon, not the steady and relentless assault of charged Jovian particles. Like a human trained to withstand a stomach punch only to find himself dragged behind a truck, the bus has suffered some damage.
Which is why one of its four elements, soon to be known as “Rebecca,” goes on-line during the descent phase as a backup to the lander’s systems, which are having a tough time locking on to the signal from Hoppa Station. Not to prolong the suspense, the landing package arrives safely, bouncing half a dozen times on the icy plain, punching holes in itself by design, and eventually disgorging four new elements.
It is only a week later when Element Earl, returning to station for thermal reasons, happens to detect (not see: his visual sensor is usually turned off to conserve power and he was simply retracing his original route) four new arrivals – the drilling, cargo, submersible, and portable power rover elements that will soon begin the search for life.
He passes close enough to the drilling rover, which is currently deploying its array, since diagnostics show it to have been damaged in the rolling, rocking landing. It so happens that the array wasn’t damaged. But in the stream of bits flowing from the drilling rover to the Hoppa central unit and splashing from one rover to another, Element Earl notes the familiar signature of Element Rebecca.
As a bit of a joke, he aims his dish at hers, and feeds her the range-rate data she had asked for earlier.
Mission control for J2E2 is in a crumbling three-story structure in the bad part of La Jolla, south of the Cove and bordering on the aptly-named Mission Beach. The building formerly housed an Internet service provider. The ISP had purchased and remodelled the place in 1998, hoping for business from the San Diego and North County high-tech communities, which were then wallowing in an unprecedented economic boom.
And did so for the better part of a decade, until a series of mergers closed the node. Then the AGC Corporation, newly formed by three researchers from UC-SD, just over the hill in La Jolla proper, leased the building for tests of their first real-time Superluminal Light Pulse Propogation/Emulation Regime (usually known as SLIPPER) on the 2012 asteroid Neva flyby. What the hell: the facility was already wired for fiber-optic and extreme bandwith, and was configured for electrical and thermal support of AGC’s ten-petaflop computer.
That was eighteen years and five interplanetary missions ago, and while the guts of what is now the J2E2 mission control have continued to evolve, the exterior has been left alone. Which presents the staff with
a problem. The ISP operation had never employed more than a dozen people, while the AGC SLIPPER project has thirty or more in the building at all times.
The parking lot is simply inadequate, and with public transport in this part of La Jolla (remember, this is California) limited to the occasional bus, with working hours staggered, with rents and home prices in La Jolla among the highest in the country . . . well, disputes are inevitable.
Earl Tolan pulls his battered Chevy pickup into the gated lot and drives up to space eleven, only to find a brand-new Volvo already there.
Tolan is fifty-nine, a senior operator on the J2E2 project after moving to AGC from Lockheed Martin, where he led teams through good times and bad for twenty years. He is not one to lose his temper without reason.
But today he happens to be returning to work after a what should have been a quick visit to the doctor, a checkup which wound up taking four hours and has left him in a bad mood. So the site of this impudent little Volvo taking up his space launches him into a state of only theoretically controlled fury.
He squeals the truck around so that its tailgate backs up to the Volvo. This is a bit of a trick, given the confined space. Tolan has to drive up and over a curb and sidewalk median just to get into position.
Once on station, as ops guys are fond of saying, he drops the tailgate, hauls out a length of chain and a hook he usually uses for attaching the smaller of his two boats to a trailer, wedges the hook in the Volvo’s rear bumper, and loops the chain around his trailer hitch.
Then he gets into the truck, puts it in low, and hauls the Volvo out of his space, a maneuver which takes him up and onto the sidewalk and into the driveway beyond. The Volvo, its gear in park and its brake set, makes a screeching sound with its tires, followed by an ominous undercarriage scraping, before fetching up onto the sidewalk median.
Where Tolan leaves it.
Wallowing in momentary self-satisfaction, he pulls around into his space. He is still quite angry, in fact, when he emerges from the truck and heads for the building entrance, where he brushes shoulders with a woman going the other way.
Had his mood been anything less than ultraviolet anger and disgust, Tolan would certainly have managed to sidestep the charging woman while simultaneously noting her looks. Which, allowing for a certain air of growing confusion, are barely worth noting: she is a little over five feet, but adding stature with heeled sandals. A pair of gray slacks suggest muscular legs, and a vest worn over a J2E2 polo shirt does nothing to conceal the solidity within. Her hair is shoulder-length, dark, with a few lighter streaks, appropriate to her age, which is fiftyish. He thinks the eyes are green, but needs a closer look.
Not that he’s inclined to give one. Twice-divorced, his sexual relationships are generally with women who would register as more attractive than this one on any visual scale.
What actually gets Tolan’s attention is this woman’s voice, which has what used to be called (in the days when people still consumed both) a whiskey and cigarette tone, tinged with some kind of Euro accent. Or perhaps it is the words she uses: “I’m gonna kill the son of a bitch who did this.” Meaning haul her Volvo onto the median.
The woman calmly walks up to the vehicle, which still quivers in the aftermath of its relocation. She folds her arms, smiles with what could have been a touch of amusement.
Tolan can still make a clean escape, though he knows it won’t be long before someone connects the evidenciary dots between Tolan’s parking space, the skid marks from it to the Volvo’s resting place. Besides, he is curious about the color of those eyes – so curious he forgets his anger over the momentary theft of a parking place, and his frustration over two hours of unwarranted medical tests.
“I’m the son of a bitch,” Tolan said.
She looks at him. Yes, green, with a charming set of smile lines. “Aren’t you old enough to know better?”
This strikes Tolan as unfair, given that he is staring at sixty on his next birthday and has just had a medical experience all-too-appropriate for that age. “Apparently not.”
To her great credit, she laughs. “I assume this was your space.” He nods. “Well, I’m so new I don’t have an assigned one. And the guard did tell me you weren’t likely to return today.”
“Surprises all around.” He holds out his hand. “Earl Tolan.”
“Rebecca Marceau.”
“I think we’ve met before.”
“Cologne?” she said, then realizes where. She blushes. “Oh! Hoppa Station.” Operators like Earl and Rebecca are often brought into the program without prior introductions. After all, they are usually mature professionals.
“Actually, about twelve klicks away,” Earl says, wondering why he feels the need to be so precise.
You have to forget everything you think you know about space flight. The SLIPPER operators aren’t astronauts. In fact, there are damned few astronauts here in 2026, just a few poor souls stuck going round and round the earth for months at a time in the crumbling EarthStar space station, hoping their work will somehow overcome the bone loss or radiation exposure or even psychological barriers that prevented a manned mission to Mars, not to mention even more distance locates such as Europa.
But exploration of the solar system continues, using unmanned vehicles which can be controlled from distances of tens of millions of miles, more or less in real-time, by human beings. The advantages are many: the vehicles can be smaller, they need only be built for a one-way trip, and using SLIPPER-linked human operators allows spacecraft builders to skip the lengthy and unpredictable development of artificial intelligence systems.
J2E2 mission control in La Jolla, then, is more like a virtual reality game den than a Shuttle-era firing room. Yes, there are the basic trajectory and electrical support stations, complete with consoles, and there is a big screen that displays telemetry from all of the many separate elements, along with selected camera views.
But the real work is done in the eight booths at the back of the control room, where each operator strips naked and dons a skintight SLIPPER suit and helmet not awfully different from scuba gear, allowing her to link up in real-time with her avatar on Europa.
To see Jupiter looming permanently on the horizon.
To feel the shudders of the hourly quakes.
To hear the crunch of treads on ice.
To smell metal and composite baked by radiation.
You can even taste the surge of energy when linked to the generator for recharging.
It’s all faux reality, of course, the work of clever programmers who have created a system which translates digital data from the elements themselves into simulated “feelings,” then reverses the process, translating an operator’s muscular impulse to reach, for example, into a command to rotate an antenna.
The best operators are those who know spacecraft and their limitations, who have proven that they can commit to a mission plan. People who simply like machines also make good operators. For J2E2, AGC tries to find those who can fit both matrixes.
And who are willing to take the risk of permanent nerve damage caused by the interface.
Rebecca operates Earl’s truck as he rocks the Volvo. He has chained the two vehicles together, and is learning that undoing his prank is easier than doing it, since the tightness of the driveway is forcing Rebecca and the truck to pull the Volvo at an angle.
But she expertly guns the motor just as Earl gets the Volvo’s front wheels on the pavement. With a hump! and whoof! and a reasonable amount of scraping, the Volvo shoots free. “That was suspiciously close to good sex,” Rebecca says, delicately wiping sweat from her eyes.
Now it is Earl’s turn to blush, something he can’t remember happening in years. (He is old enough to know better about this, too.) He had been thinking the same thing. “You like cars,” he says, lamely, fitting her neatly into that subset of the operator personality matrix, something the operators do both consciously and instinctively, like long-lost tribesmen smelling each other.
&
nbsp; “Guilty, officer,” she says, and looks at the truck, with its complement of nautical equipment. “And for you it must be boats.”
“Two of them. A runabout and a forty-five-footer.” The tribal recognition isn’t strong enough to overcome their mutual antagonism. Note that there is no invitation to take a sail.
“See you on Europa.”
On Europa, science is marching more slowly than usual. Element Rebecca is tasked with drilling a hole through the icy crust at a site seven kilometers north of Hoppa Station. The same spot Element Earl was scouting the day the science package arrived.
Now, from a distance, at the macro level, Europa’s surface isn’t as rugged as that of the rockier moons in the solar system. The constant Jovian tidal forces working on the ice and slush tend to smooth out the most extreme differences in height.
But at the micro level, down where a wheeled or tracked element must traverse, the surface resembles an unweathered lava field, filled with sharp boulders, crossed with narrow but deep fissures, cracks, and cycloids. These, of course, were mapped by Element Earl on his original recon – collecting that data was one of his primary goals, so it could be beamed to earth, turned into a three-dimensional map file, then uplinked to Element Rebecca.
The problem is, new cycloids can form in days, changing the whole landscape. Before Element Rebecca, her traverse delayed due to other equipment problems, gets five kilometers from Hoppa, her map ceases to be useful.
And there she stops, asking for guidance.
Earl Tolan is what they used to call an unsympathetic character, back when people still made such judgments. You wouldn’t like him, on first meeting. He is smart and also opinionated, a combination which has made friends, family, and co-workers uncomfortable, since he has a bad habit of telling others how best to live their lives, and with great accuracy.
The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15 Page 15
