The Tranquillity Alternative

by Allen Steele

  Enjoying the moonlight, music, and rare solitude, he pans the telescope across the starscape, playing a solitary game of identifying constellations without consulting the star chart on the clipboard strapped to his leg. There, just to the right of Jupiter, is Libra; below it is Lupus. Scorpius is easy to find, but he has to cheat by checking the chart before he can name Ara.

  However, when he looks at the chart, he notices that Pluto should be in sight, not far from Ophiuchus. Now there’s a challenge; Pluto is a dim object, difficult to locate even under the best of conditions. He reaches down to grasp the wheel which will turn the couch on its pedestal, when his headset buzzes.

  Startled by the sudden sound, for a moment he thinks it’s someone down below trying to get his attention. Then he hears a faint voice:

  Conestoga, this is Space Station One … Conestoga, this is Station One, Wheel Command. Do you copy? Over.

  He fumbles at the communications carrier on his belt until he finds the vox switch. “Um, roger that, Wheel Command, this is Conestoga, Parnell speaking. We copy, over.”

  Conestoga is now over 200,000 miles from Earth, so there’s a four-second transmission lag: time enough for Parnell to wonder why the Wheel would be calling during a scheduled sleep period. Of course, they would know he’d be on duty at this hour—it’s customary for the mission commander to take the fire watch—but the practice of hourly status checks between en route moonships and the Wheel was retired years ago.

  Gene, this is Joe … ah, we need you to switch to the KU-4 band if you can, please, and prepare for a Code One transmission. Do you copy? Over.

  Recognizing Joe Laughlin’s voice, Parnell frowns. The KU-4 band is a secure channel which can’t be monitored outside A-deck, reserved only for emergency transmissions. Code One means that the RF scrambler is to be used, further safeguarding the privacy of the comlink; not only that, but if anyone else is on A-deck, he is supposed to get rid of them.

  He flips the switch again. “Okay, Joe, I copy that. Next transmission will be on KU-4, Code One. Over.”

  He unbuckles himself from the astrogator’s station and pulls himself along the ceiling handrails until he reaches the pilot’s couch on the far side of the deck. He considers shutting the gangway hatch, but decides against it; the noise might awaken someone below and raise uncomfortable questions he couldn’t answer. Besides, the music should mask his side of the conversation.

  Parnell slides into Ryer’s couch and hastily knots the seat belt around his stomach. He replugs his headset into the console, then types the appropriate commands into the computer keyboard. A subaudible buzz through the headset tells him that he’s on the right frequency and the scrambler is activated. “Wheel Command, this is Conestoga, Parnell on Code One. Do you copy, over?”

  Laughlin’s voice comes back on line: Gotcha, Gene. Are you alone?

  “All by my lonesome. A little paranoid tonight, aren’t we?”

  It’s meant as a joke, but Laughlin isn’t in the mood. Look, Gene, I’m patching through one of my boys here. You met him a couple of days ago … Curtis Zimm, the taxi driver who brought you guys over from Constellation and took you to Conestoga. He’s got something to discuss with you.

  Parnell only vaguely remembers Zimm; it takes a moment before he matches the name with the skinhead kid he had encountered briefly aboard Harpers Ferry. Kind of a smartass, as he recalls. “Dr. Z, right,” he says. “Jeez, Joe, is this important? I’ve got a ship to run here.”

  A few seconds later, Dr. Z himself comes on-line. Commander? This is Curtis Zimm. His voice is hesitant, uncertain. Umm … I’m sorry to bother you like this, but I’ve learned something I think you should know about, and … well, I know this is going to sound crazy, but when I told Joe about it he said I should talk to you at once and …

  “Yeah, okay, son.” Parnell rubs his closed eyelids with his fingertips. “Let’s just hear it, okay?”

  He hears Zimm take a deep breath. I think someone on your ship is an imposter.

  It took a while to get the entire story out of Zimm. Initially everything came out as a rushed, disjointed babble of names, places, dates, and coincidences; Parnell had to stop him several times and get him to repeat something more slowly.

  At first, Parnell was incredulous. The idea that Paul Dooley wasn’t who he claimed to be was a bit hard to swallow; he almost laughed out loud when he heard about Mr. Grid and the kinky computer-sex games she had been playing with Dooley for several months. Yet Joe Laughlin seemed to be taking this seriously, and Joe wasn’t the type to be gulled into believing nonsense. If Joe said that there might be something to Zimm’s story, then Parnell had to give the kid the benefit of the doubt.

  It wasn’t until Dr. Z started giving him a blow-by-blow account of the Le Matrix dialogue between Mr. Grid and Thor200—or rather, between Dooley and a lonely young woman in Phoenix named Gabrielle Blumfield—and listed all the missed cues in their on-line conversation, that Parnell began to have misgivings of his own about Dooley. As Zimm spoke, Parnell recalled Dooley’s erratic behavior over the past three days; from the moment they had climbed aboard Constellation, when he couldn’t fasten his couch harness without assistance from the whiteroom techs, to dinner earlier this evening, when he had been unable to eat a simple meal without making a floating mess, Dooley had demonstrated clumsiness at every turn. More than once, Parnell had wondered if Dooley had slept through his training sessions at Von Braun; he couldn’t even visit the head down on D-deck without someone giving him instructions on how to properly use the zero-g toilet. If Parnell hadn’t known better, he could have sworn that Dooley hadn’t been trained at all, but instead had tried to get by with reading old instruction manuals.

  And then there was the fact that Dooley had been keeping to himself during the entire mission. Parnell had chosen to overlook the young hacker’s absence from the going-away dinner on the Wheel three nights ago, just as he had dismissed Dooley’s tardy arrival at the Cape before the ferry launch. Yet ever since Conestoga had left Earth orbit, Dooley had confined himself to his bunk on C-deck, where he either slept or watched an endless parade of videos on the VCR. He seldom went anywhere else in the personnel sphere; seemingly, there was no impulse to explore the mammoth spaceship. Not once had he visited A-deck, not even to send a personal message to someone on Earth.

  On reflection, Parnell realized that the overbearing young man he had briefly encountered at the Cape during mission rehearsals had subtly changed. Dooley had been a pain in the ass, to be sure; a few NASA trainers had wanted to smack the little son of a bitch just on general principles. But he had never been aloof, never been so repetitively clumsy … and despite his arrogant dismissal of obsolete American space technology, he had nonetheless displayed curiosity about the mock-ups of the machines he would soon be riding into space.

  To be sure, this Paul Dooley had the same face, the same strident voice, the same tendency to accentuate everything he said with four-letter words. Nonetheless, now that it was pointed out to Parnell by a third party, there was a mile of difference between this Paul Dooley and that Paul Dooley.

  It was almost as if they were two different people entirely.

  And there’s one more thing, Zimm said as he finished reiterating the dialogue between LadyG and DukePaul. It may be nothing, but it really began to make us wonder, y’know, if …

  “Spell it out, son,” Parnell said impatiently. The Miles Davis tape had long since ended, leaving a cold silence on the command deck. He glanced at the gangway ladder; no one had entered A-deck, but he wished he had closed the hatch. “Let’s hear everything,” he added, lowering his voice so that it wouldn’t carry.

  Gaby … Mr. Grid, that is … got curious about the long time-delay she had with Paul when they were on the net, the night before the launch, when he was staying at the motel. Remember how I told you about the pizza delivery, and how he seemed to take a while to get back on-line after he said the pizza boy had come?

  There was a short pause
. Well, sort of on impulse, today she signed onto CompuNet. That’s another computer network, see, and it carries the on-line edition of the Orlando Sentinel. That’s the major daily paper in …

  He knows the paper, Curtis, Joe interrupted. He lives in Florida, remember?

  Uh … right. Sorry. Anyway, she scanned all the recent stories in the regional edition … just a shot in the dark, y’know … and she found a small item on page ten.

  Parnell heard him take another deep breath. The story said that the body of a local kid, name of Jeff Norton, had been found yesterday in an orange grove on Indian River. He was shot in the back of the head. This kid had been reported missing by his parents after he didn’t come home from work last Wednesday night.

  Another pause. The paper said that he worked as a delivery boy at a pizza place on Satellite Beach. He hadn’t been seen since he left to make a delivery at six-fifteen, and he never returned to the restaurant.

  Parnell felt his heart skip a beat.

  “Dooley was staying at a motel on Satellite Beach,” he said, remembering small talk at the breakfast table in the Operations and Checkout ready-room, the morning of the launch. “Does this lady remember when Dooley said his pizza was delivered?”

  The response came a few seconds later. Le Matrix logged the time of her last chat with Dooley before the launch, Zimm said. She looked it up on her billing record. He talked to her between six-thirty and six-forty-one that evening, Eastern time. That’s about the same time the Norton kid disappeared … and she says Dooley was real short with her when he came back on-line.

  They were both quiet for a minute. There were a lot of coincidences, to be sure … yet somehow, Parnell didn’t hear his bullshit detector ringing.

  His mind churned over the facts. A teenager disappears from the same area where Dooley is staying the night before the ferry launch, on his way to deliver a pizza to Dooley. The pizza is delivered, but the kid’s body later turns up in a grove in the general vicinity. A few hours later, Dooley appears at the Cape … but he doesn’t act quite the same way, either to professional acquaintances or to his secret on-line lover.

  And this is the same person who has a pivotal role in the final disposal of six nuclear missiles on the Moon.

  Gene? You copy?

  Laughlin’s voice broke his train of thought. “Roger that, Joe,” he replied. “I’m just trying to pull it together.”

  By the way, I don’t know if it means anything, but remember that … y’know, the thing I showed you the other night?

  It took him a moment to recall the secret launch site in North Korea. “Yeah, Joe, I remember. What about it?”

  Another four-second delay. I checked it out again today, when ISPY made another pass over the same area. No rocket, but there’s a lot of scorch marks on the pad. Looks like something might have lifted off while we weren’t looking. And if it means anything to you, Poppa McGraw of MR One-Three reported spotting something that looked like a liftoff from that hemisphere, about the same time you jettisoned the DT’s. We were at perigee when the event happened, so we couldn’t see anything. Have you?

  “No, we haven’t.” On the other hand, Parnell reminded himself, they hadn’t been looking. The long-range radar system was still down. “Who else knows about this?”

  There was a long delay. Parnell wondered whether Dr. Z was still in Main-Ops or if he had been dismissed from the deck. Probably the latter; Joe was nothing if not cautious about keeping military secrets.

  I’ve reported the launch and sighting to our friends in Virginia, Laughlin said after a few seconds, but they haven’t said boo about it. Your guess is as good as mine.

  Okay. So the Koreans had launched their first satellite. “It’s probably nothing that you won’t see in the papers tomorrow,” Parnell said. “What about the Dooley thing? Who knows about that?”

  No one else yet, Laughlin replied. We wanted to take it up with you first before anyone went screaming to the feds. I mean, it’s all pretty goddamn bizarre, when you think about it. I wouldn’t want the FBI to think we’ve lost our shit up here, know what I mean?

  Parnell nodded his head, forgetting for the moment that his friend couldn’t see him. “Roger that, but I think you better take it up with Washington anyway. It looks pretty weird, all things considered. You copy?”

  A few more seconds of delay. The connection was getting scratchy as the Wheel traveled around the far side of Earth, its signal once again fuzzed despite satellite relays. Roger that, Gene. Look … it may be nothing, but keep an eye on that guy of yours, okay? Let us know if anything’s fishy. Over.

  “We copy, Wheel,” Parnell said. “I’ll take it under advisement. Conestoga over.”

  Okay, pal. We’ll keep you posted. Wheel Command over and out.

  Then Parnell was left with nothing but white noise. He switched off the radio, lay back in the couch, and reflected upon everything he had just been told.

  He was still thinking some two hours later when he heard someone coming up the ladder from belowdecks. Looking around, he saw Jay Lewitt float up the gangway shaft, bleary-eyed and clutching a squeeze bulb in his free hand.

  “Morning, skipper. Why’s it so dark in here?” Lewitt found the dimmer switch next to the ladder and turned up the ceiling lights a few degrees. Parnell blinked in the sudden glare, and the flight engineer grinned at him. “You haven’t been sleeping on watch, have you?”

  “Naw. Uh-uh.” Parnell shook his head. “I was on the telescope for a while; then I got off and came over here.” He didn’t want to mention the conversation he’d just had with the Wheel. Not yet, at least. “How’s everything below? Everyone still asleep?”

  “Like babies.” Lewitt signed himself into the logbook next to the command couch, then glided over to the engineering station. “’Cept for the Germans, of course … man, Hans and Franz sure snore loud.”

  Parnell smiled despite his worries. The nicknames Ryer had given Aachener and Talsbach had stuck but good, even if they were known only among the command crew. And the Germans were loud; Parnell’s bunk was below Aachener’s, and last night he had to shake him several times before the astronaut-trainee finally shut up. “I hope the jazz I put on didn’t keep you up,” he said.

  “Hmm?” Lewitt glanced away from his console for a moment. “Naw, it didn’t keep me awake. Didn’t even hear it.” He swore under his breath as he studied one of the meters. “Hey, you bastard! You forgot to realign the solar array. Battery’s down three percent.”

  “I did? Sorry about that.” He watched as Lewitt carefully adjusted a knob which turned the outrigger mercury-solar mirror toward the Sun. Still, he was relieved to find that Lewitt hadn’t overheard his end of the conversation with the Wheel; if Jay hadn’t heard it, then the chances were good that no one else had either.

  Nonetheless, Parnell knew that he couldn’t handle this by himself. He had to confide in someone he could trust, and Lewitt was the best prospect. As the flight engineer settled into his couch, Parnell unbuckled himself from the pilot’s seat and pushed over to his friend.

  “Hey, Jay,” he said softly, grabbing hold of a ceiling rail and looking down at the engineer, “there’s something I’ve got to tell you. While you were asleep, I received a call from the station …”

  It took just a few minutes for Parnell to relate the gist of the emergency transmission from Laughlin and Zimm. He left out many of the details, if only because it would have taken too long to explain the exact nature of the relationship between Thor200 and Mr. Grid. He was surprised to see that Lewitt took it so calmly; his only outward display of emotion was a raised eyebrow and a slight pursing of his lips as he listened to his commander’s suspicions.

  “And you believe this?” Jay asked when Parnell was finished.

  Parnell shrugged. “I don’t know. It sounds kind of farfetched, but …”

  “But it came from Old Joe, and Hal Robinson doesn’t write science fiction anymore.” Jay took a sip from his lukewarm coffee, grimaced,
and tucked the squeeze bulb between his knees so it wouldn’t drift away. “I dunno. I gotta admit, Dooley’s been acting sort of flaky ever since we got started. But that’s no real reason to start thinking he’s …”

  “An imposter?”

  “An imposter, whatever you want to call him.” Lewitt grinned. “Did you ever see that movie … what was it, The Manchurian Candidate? The one where John Lennon is supposed to be brainwashed into killing a presidential candidate?” He shrugged. “Good movie, but I thought it was kind of a crock.”

  “Maybe so.” Gene had been pursuing the same line of thought for the last two hours. “This isn’t a movie, though … and Dooley’s the guy who’s supposed to reactivate the bunker computers at Teal Falcon.”

  “We’ve got the keys …”

  “We’ve got the keys, sure, but he’s the man carrying the football.”

  “The computer codes?” Jay’s eyes narrowed. “What are you getting at?”

  “Think about it.” Parnell gripped the bar above his head and performed a clumsy chin-up. “He’s carrying half of the program that activates the bunker’s c-cube system. Once he plugs it in, he’s got complete control of the Minutemen. That means he doesn’t have to fire them toward the Sun. If he wants, he can aim them at any point on Earth …”

  “Yeah, but what does that do?” Lewitt looked at him askance. “C’mon. So he decides to fire them at … I dunno, Washington, D.C., or New York, whatever. It would still take two days for the rockets to reach ground zero. NORAD would see them coming long before then and do something about it.”

  “Like what? Evacuate Washington or New York? You have any idea what that would take?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t have to be a city. It could be Crystal Palace itself.” Crystal Palace was the code name for NORAD’s strategic defense complex beneath Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. “Maybe it would be Owl Hoot, Minnesota. Point is, they’d have two days to scramble an a-sat system and blow ’em out of space.”