Saturn Run

by John Sandford

  They worked it for an hour, Martinez pushing Sandy to react more and more quickly to weird, unnatural commands. He fumbled a few times, but got it right more often than not. As they worked, station personnel would sometimes pause at a nearby view window and watch them play.

  For some reason that Sandy didn’t know at the time, the station wall behind the port was painted black. He found out later that the paint job cut down internal reflections, so if you were contemplating, say, the Milky Way, you could really see the Milky Way. What he saw with his art history eye, though, was that when the station personnel paused by the window, framed in a rectangle slightly wider than it was high, they looked like paintings by Caravaggio.

  Sandy unhitched the lid of his camera case and pulled out a Red. He pressed it up against the egg’s window, using the front-edge electro-adhesive grips to hold it in place. Then he nudged the controller and sent the egg into a very slow spin, doing a fifteen-second pan of Habitat 1, the earth, and the black, starry space surrounding it all.

  He killed his rotation with the window facing the station and did a slow zoom-in on the viewing port. He moved closer, and closer, until he was hovering just outside, and his proximity alarm beeped.

  Martinez said, “You’re getting pretty tight there.”

  “I know,” Sandy said. “Give me a second.” Sandy unstuck the Red, selected a 100mm zoom setting. A crewman walked past the window, paused to look at the egg hovering outside, then went on, but Sandy had time to do a basic reading on the light coming off his face.

  “Hey, Joe, how much of a hassle would it be to get Fiorella over by that observation window?”

  “Depends on what she’s doing,” Martinez said. “We’ve got links to all you new guys, let me try her.”

  “Thanks.”

  Joe came back a moment later. “She’s at Starbucks, probably fifty meters away. What’s up?”

  “Can you link me to her?”

  “Sure. Hold one . . .”

  Fiorella came up: “What?”

  “I need you to walk fifty meters down the hall, or whatever, to the viewport. I’m outside in an egg. I want to look at the light on your face. Do an establishing shot.”

  After a second of silence, probably calculating exactly how much she hated him, Sandy thought, Fiorella said, “Okay.”

  A minute later, she appeared at the window. The reflected sunlight off her hair was spectacular, maybe too spectacular.

  “What do you want me to do?” she asked.

  “Let me get a read . . .” Sandy thumbed down the red-gain, just a bit, because he wanted to keep the play of light off her hair, added a touch of color to her face, brought up her cheekbones, deepened a few shadows, then said, “Look sort of pensively off to your left, as though you’re watching construction work. . . . Tip your head just a millimeter or so to the right, I need to get that reflection off your nose. . . . Step five centimeters back. . . . Okay, hold that . . . one, two, three. Now slowly, slowly turn back to your right, turn your shoulder as you survey the scene. . . . Shit, I’m losing your hair. Let’s do that again. I need to make the background a little denser, and I need you to do all that over again, and talk, tell people what you’re seeing out there.”

  They worked it for five minutes, then Sandy said, “Okay, I got it.”

  “Send it to me,” Fiorella said.

  “Don’t have your phone number.”

  He could see her sub-vocalizing, talking to her implants, and then she said aloud, “You should have it.”

  Sandy checked his wrist-wrap, saved the number, and sent the vid file. “You’ve got the file. I’ll talk to you when I get back inside.”

  Martinez called: “You ready to go back in?”

  “I’m ready, but I don’t want to.”

  “I’m getting hungry out here.”

  “Then let’s go. I’ve got some vid to look at.”

  —

  Inside the air lock, Sandy popped the egg’s door, then relaxed back in the seat, pulled the monitor out of the Red, and skipped through his survey footage to the shots of Fiorella. Martinez cycled through the double doors to look over his shoulder.

  When the last of the shots ran out, Sandy asked, “What do you think?”

  “You’re a natural on the egg. You could get a job up here. And if Fiorella doesn’t like that vid, she’s nuts. She’s a redheaded Venus.”

  “Thank you. Listen, how hard is it to alter the canopy on the egg?”

  “What do you need?”

  “I need to inset some ports. I need to take out a few chunks of standard glass and replace it with optical glass. Shooting through the standard canopy glass degrades the image. That’s okay for the propaganda vid, but if we want the highest level of detail on the documentary stuff, I’ll need optical glass.”

  “I can do the insets if you can get the glass, and if it can pass the stress tests,” Martinez said.

  “We’d probably need some clip-on covers—lens caps—when we’re not actually using the glass, protect it from scratches.”

  “We’ve got a good fabrication shop up here, shouldn’t be a problem,” Martinez said. “Shoot me some specs on size and I’ll print them for you.”

  “I’ll talk to Leica, see what they can get us,” Sandy said. “I’ll try to get the specs to you soon as I hear from them.” He thought for a moment. “Is your stuff sophisticated enough to print a guitar?”

  “You gotta be kidding me—you play?”

  “Yeah. You too?”

  “I’ve printed maybe twenty guitars since I’ve been here,” Martinez said. “Shoved all but two of them into the recycling, but I’ve got a Les Paul replica that’s so sweet you won’t believe it. Right now, me and another guy are about halfway done printing a piano—like a whole fucking grand piano with strings—but making pianists happy is a lot harder than getting a guitar right.”

  “We could start a band,” Sandy said, with his toothy grin.

  “We got a band—in fact, there are five or six bands, if string quartets count as bands,” Martinez said. “Music is big up here. Everybody’s a specialist in something, with not a lot of overlap. Music is one thing you can do in low gravity without complications, and it’s a good way for people to get together.”

  They headed back down the corridor to the lift that would take them to Habitat 1, talking about cameras, video games, and guitars—a friendship being formed. On the way, Sandy’s wrist-wrap tingled: Crow.

  “Yeah, what’s up?”

  “What’d you do?” Crow asked.

  “I was getting checked out on an egg,” Sandy said.

  “I mean, what did you do with Fiorella?”

  “Took some pictures of her. Why?”

  “She mentioned that it’s barely possible that she might be able to work with you, after all.”

  12.

  Captain Fang-Castro looked from the visitor sitting across the desk, to the screen on the wall opposite. The screen was divided into chunks, the chunks growing or shrinking depending on who was speaking. The occupants of the screen’s real estate were scattered across the U.S., the best and brightest geeks that DARPA money could buy. Which was pretty damn good, she’d found out back when she was a DARPA liaison.

  They were the reigning heavyweight champions of design, putting together a system that would kick her station across 1.5 billion kilometers of empty space, to a rendezvous with who-knows-what.

  The geeks were not happy.

  Their unhappiness was focused on the challenger, a short, round blonde who was part of a team ferried up by Crow, who’d told Fang-Castro that the blonde, Rebecca Johansson, was probably the best in the world at what she did, which was designing power and heat flow management systems.

  Fang-Castro was still getting a read on the engineer; she mixed the soft-spoken style of a well-raised Midwestern woman with the so
cial graces of an engineer, which was to say, not all that many.

  She was quiet, pleasant, and blunt.

  Johansson was wrapping up her spiel. “That’s about the size of it. Literally. If we try to run ordinary low-temperature heat radiators, they will be so many kilometers in size that the mass will kill us—they’ll be larger than the mass budget for the entire ship. We need to go to high-temperature radiators, I’m thinking around six hundred Celsius, with molten metal heat exchangers. Then I can pump the heat from the reactors fast enough, and get the waste heat into the radiators fast enough, to dump all of that waste heat into space with a radiator that’s a few percent of the size we’d need otherwise.”

  One of the earth engineers started to jump in, but Johansson cut him off. “I know the reactors are up to it, don’t tell me they’re not. You can get a lot better than a gigawatt out of a ton of core, and I can siphon it off with pressurized liquid sodium at around two thousand Celsius. You can either boil that directly or run a secondary boiling sodium cycle to run the primary turbines at nineteen hundred Celsius and a downstream supercritical water vapor turbine to get the exhaust down to six hundred and fifty Celsius, and I can take it from there.”

  The face of one of the earthbound engineers, Harry Lomax, ballooned in size on the view screen, as he waved his hands in frustration. “Are we really supposed to consider this? It’s nuts. There’s no possible way.”

  From the corner of her eye, Fang-Castro saw Johansson about to jab back. Without taking her eyes from the monitor and the engineer, she waved one hand at the blonde in a way that said, Wait. I’m the referee. Let me ref.

  “Harry,” Fang-Castro said, “you’re saying it’s literally impossible? Because if it is, if this is simply a dreadful mistake on Ms. Johansson’s part, I’ll be happy to dismiss our new engineer and request someone better suited to the task.”

  The blonde opened her mouth, Fang-Castro waved again, and the blonde closed her mouth.

  Lomax paused a moment, disconcerted by the opening he’d been handed. Fang-Castro waited patiently.

  “Okay, maybe the wrong choice of words,” Lomax said. “It’s not physically impossible: it doesn’t violate any known physical laws and it doesn’t require materials we haven’t invented yet. But it’s completely and utterly unrealistic.”

  “So what you’re saying is, it’s a possible solution in a terribly difficult situation, you just don’t have the wherewithal to do your part of the required design.”

  “That’s not exactly what I was saying . . .”

  Fang-Castro pointed to Becca, who said, “I agree with Dr. Lomax that the whole mission timetable is ridiculous and unrealistic, but it is what it is. Dr. Lomax, you can design all the reactors you want, but if they melt, they ain’t going to Saturn. We gotta get rid of the heat. That’s not optional. Run the numbers yourself. If you’ve got a better suggestion than mine, I’d be delighted to hear it.”

  Fang-Castro jumped in: “Harry, I agree with Dr. Johansson here. We’ve got to get rid of the heat. I also agree with you: this solution does strike me as unrealistic. Come back to me with a better idea. Quickly, if you please. Orders need to be cut.”

  Lomax wasn’t ready to let it go. “Dr. Johansson’s scheme wastes huge amounts of energy. We’ll need to scale up the entire power plant by fifty percent to compensate, and we still have to stay within our weight budget. I don’t see how.”

  “That’s why I’m giving you options,” Fang-Castro said. “You can come up with a different way to handle the heat management, or figure out how to upscale the power plant. Give me a call when you get that figured out. Tomorrow would be good.”

  Fang-Castro shut down the conference window and turned back to her guest.

  “So, Becca: Will they come up with a better idea? And if not, can they build the power train you need?”

  Becca chewed the end of a stylus for a few seconds, then her eyes flicked up to Fang-Castro’s. “I don’t believe there is a better idea. The DARPA guys are really smart, and maybe I’ve overlooked something, but I don’t think so. I want to be clear: I’m not saying my solution is optimal, but there is some basic thermodynamics at work here, and my solution is as good as it gets, with the timetable that’s been imposed on us. I’m pretty sure I can handle my side of the engineering. As for them handling theirs, I don’t know. I’ve seen refractory ceramic composite turbines demonstrated that ought to do the job, but that’s not really my expertise. Maybe they’ll find they can’t do it. I’m not sure there’s anything else. So, no: they won’t find a better idea.”

  “Good enough, Becca.” Fang-Castro sighed. The whole mission was right on the bleeding edge of insanity. “I’ll get someone to take you down to Engineering so you can get a feel for our current environment.”

  —

  John Clover didn’t have to take pictures of the station, or set up news reports about it; he didn’t have to worry about anything but his brain. And the cat.

  Chapman, the tall, thin woman, led him to the elevator-equivalent that took them to Habitat 1. “We’re having a get-together in the Commons in fifteen minutes,” she told him “An informal affair, open to anyone who wants to come, but there were already quite a few there before you arrived.”

  “The Commons. That sounds a trifle ominous,” Clover said. “Like the place where the aliens touch their heads together while they’re getting Roto-Rootered by the Leader.”

  “Okay. Call it the cafeteria,” Chapman said. “It’s that, too, at mealtimes. Anyway, we can drop your stuff and the cat at your cabin—the cat should sleep for a while yet, and we’ve already set up a cat pan and so on—and let you wash your face or whatever.”

  “I do have to whatever,” Clover said. “But I don’t want to hold people up. I hope Mr. Snuffles is okay.”

  “I’m sure he is. We’ve had a couple of cats up here before, you know. They were subjects of various experiments. They adapt quite well.”

  “Good. I’m a little worried.”

  Clover took a leak and washed his face, and Chapman escorted him to the Commons, where twenty-five or thirty people were waiting. They stood and applauded, which made Clover smile, and Chapman led him to a lectern, gave a brief introduction, and Clover said, “I have no prepared comments. I didn’t know they might be needed. The main reason I’m up here is to see if I can stand it . . . being up here. So far, so good. I just keep saying to myself, ‘Put your foot down, John.’ Anyway, maybe I’ll give a talk some other time, but right now, I’ll put it on you-all. Ask me questions: ask me anything.”

  They did. They asked about the probability that Earth-like evolution would be working on an alien planet. Clover said, “High. Unless the beings were created instantaneously by their own biblical God, they probably proceeded from simple organisms to complex ones. I also suspect it’s probable that they grew up in a gaseous atmosphere rather than a liquid environment, and that they have sight, that they hear sound. All of those things have been invented several times on Earth, and are critical to an evolved tech state, in my opinion. Note that I don’t say their eyes are necessarily like ours—they could be like insect eyes—but they can see. Note that I also don’t specify that they see the same wavelengths as we do, only that they can see. In my opinion.”

  They asked about the possibility that aliens would be so culturally unlike Earth people that communication would be impossible. Clover said, “Depends on what kind of aliens you’re talking about. Exo-bacteria would fit the definition of alien, and we can’t communicate with our own bacteria. But if you’re talking about technological beings, we should be able to communicate because communication involves the manipulation of symbols, and we should be able to build a dictionary starting with basics. For example, no matter how alien the aliens might be, hydrogen is hydrogen, and iron is iron, and light travels at the same speed for both cultures. With a highly evolved species, we should be able to create the e
quivalents of The Physics Handbook, and compare them, and that in itself would provide leads to sophisticated symbol manipulation—or language. The place where we might have problems would be understanding highly evolved cultural tastes based on physical differences. For example, we have rather inane performances called ‘light shows’ on Earth. Given an alien species with different eyes, that respond to much wider wavelengths than ours, they may have evolved a terrifically sophisticated ‘music’ based on vision, rather than hearing. We might never understand that. On the other hand, there are millions of people on Earth who don’t understand jazz—so those kinds of differences can be dealt with.

  “But that doesn’t mean we’d be compatible. They sure wouldn’t look like us, they sure wouldn’t think just like us. Think about how many wars have been started on Earth over misunderstandings, and we’re all the same species, evolved on the same planet. Would we have lots in common with aliens? I expect so. But we’d probably have lots of ways to piss each other off without even knowing it, so if and when we meet the little green guys it’ll be ‘step lightly, people.’”

  They talked for two hours, the questions ranging from high-school basics to postdoc details. Chapman called a halt when the food service started opening up at a shift change.

  “Lot of smart people here,” Clover said, as Chapman took him back to his cabin.

  “Yes. And that was probably less than a third of the people who actually wanted to come, but couldn’t because of work assignments or sleep period. The fact is, half of us are up here because we got interested in space and aliens when we were kids. . . . But I have a question for you. I didn’t want to ask it during the meeting, though I thought it might come up.”

  “Go ahead,” Clover said.

  “Why are they sending an anthropologist to Mars? There aren’t any aliens on Mars.”

  Clover smiled and said, “I asked the same thing. Promise you won’t tell?”

  “I won’t.”

  “Because the President wanted me to go,” Clover said. “She’s a fan, she’s read my books. She was one of those kids who wanted to know about space and aliens. She sent me a note and said she hoped that actually living in a space environment would inspire me to new insights.”