by Unknown
“It’s a pretty big rock, too. We can’t get a good image yet, but the estimate is about nine kilometers for the major axis. Somebody surely would’ve seen it before, if it was in this orbit. It wasn’t. Look what happens if we run the trajectory backward.”
The orange line, extending out toward the edge of the screen, brushed the point of light that was Jupiter.
“See? Jupiter grabbed that rock out of space, less than a year ago, and threw it practically right at us.”
“Now look at this.” Travis shoved a set of printed graphs at her. “That’s a radar shot. And that’s speckle interferometry, and those others are spectroscopic studies, infrared studies. Definite differences between the poles. One end of the rock is real black, blacker than the black velvet they paint those bullfighters on. The other end is kind of blackish red. It looks like we got some kind of complex object here.”
He shoved more documents across the conference table. His timing seemed calculated to let Robin study the data he was presenting not quite long enough, before flattering her with the assumption that she had absorbed it fully, then giving her more.
“Rotational period about fifteen hours. Kind of a lazy wobble, suggesting maybe the center of mass is off to one side. That’s consistent with the notion that we’ve got something out of the ordinary here.”
She studied the graphs until she felt she understood them, at least on a gut level. Yes, an unusual object. Very tight orbit around the sun. Off center, oddly colored. Interesting indeed. But no more graphs were forthcoming; she looked up at Travis, inquiring. He was staring at her expectantly.
“Hell, it’s damned exciting, isn’t it?” he said, his green eyes blazing. “We land on an asteroid, we take our samples, we leave our experiments. Seismometers, maybe a gravity wave package, whatever the scientists think of. Then what happens?”
CAPAD 1
Detail of Travis’s CADPAD, showing approximate position of planets on December 15, 2020, when Apollo object 2021 XA is thought to have encountered Jupiter.
Robin said, “It all falls into the sun.”
“Damn near!” He was gleeful. “Not quite, but oh my, yes, the heat is gonna be fierce, three or four thousand degrees on the surface. That asteroid’s gonna burn.”
Robin leaned back in her chair. “Which pretty much trashes your leave-behind experiments.”
“But we get spectacular data before they go. And some of the instruments we put inside.” Travis shoved the next diagram at her, a crosshatched oval object with a shaft reaching to its center. “Strictly schematic,” he apologized. “We sink a shaft with laser pulse drills. The inside experiments will keep sending—not to Earth—Earth’ll be behind the sun by then, but maybe to Mars—until the antennas melt. We can delay that by siting several antennas where the asteroid’s surface is in shadow the longest as it rolls around the sun. After the antennas go, the instruments’ll still be there. If there’s anything left of this rock after perihelion, we can go recover ’em at some future time.”
“It would be good science,” she agreed, carefully.
“Robin,” he said, clasping his sinewy wrinkled hands on the table and looking at her almost intimately, “that rock is gonna come closer to the sun than any object in known history. Leastways any that survived. Some objects we know of didn’t survive—comets that got eaten—”
“Starprobe, of course,” she interjected, “at the turn of the century.”
“Got burned up when its attitude control crapped out,” he concurred.
“Which is a principal reason for our mission.”
“But even the two solar orbiters you’re gonna launch won’t come as close to the sun as this rock; they couldn’t—and hope to last a year in that inferno.”
“How would this asteroid rendezvous of yours fit in with the current mission profile?”
He grinned with all his teeth. “You’re gonna like this.” He pushed keys to animate the display. “This is your profile as currently planned, accordin’ to the design study dated November last year”—Travis glanced at her inquiringly—“which is the latest I could get hold of.”
She shrugged. “A few details have been refined. Nothing crucial.”
“That’s what Taylor said. Anyway…”
The lights that were planets moved ponderously in their nearly circular orbits, the Earth approaching that point on its orbit corresponding to early summer. “In June of next year, Starfire will do a retro burn to de-orbit Earth.” As he spoke, a bright red dot appeared at Earth, quickly lengthening into a red line that curved inward toward the sun. “That puts the ship in free fall toward the sun, which would be about sixty-five days if she went all the way in.”
Robin nodded agreement.
The red line lengthened inward, toward the orbit of Venus. “Long before she gets to the sun, a couple of weeks out, as she’s approachin’ Venus, Starfire deploys the two solar satellites,” Travis said. “They continue in free fall, eventually usin’ their on board engines to go into fixed orbits around the sun—one equatorial, one polar.”
Two bright blue pinpoints of light blossomed and continued to fall toward the sun.
“After the launch, Starfire does another burn to Venus and gets a gravity boost back to Earth,” he said. The red line looped around the bright dot that was Venus and headed back toward Earth. “A final brakin’ maneuver and you’re home, six weeks after you left.” The red line rejoined the dot that was Earth.
Travis froze the completed diagram.
CAPAD 2
Detail of Travis’s CADPAD, showing approximate position of planets on June 10, 2023, scheduled date of Starfire’s mission to launch solar probes.
“You’ve got the big picture.” Robin’s tone was noncommittal.
He grinned. “But why am I wastin’ your time tellin’ you what you already know?” He poked at keys on the CADPAD console. “Excuse the primitive technology—just serves to underscore how beautifully simple this thing really is.”
The screen went blank. The sun reappeared, and once more the inner planets were moving in their nearly circular orbits. “Your launch window is determined by free fall to Venus. But Starfire is so powerful, you’ve got considerable leeway in that. Look what happens if you delay launch by five weeks.”
On the CADPAD, as the Earth reached the point corresponding to late August, the asteroid’s orange line slid in from Jupiter, fast lengthening toward the sun. Starfire’s bright red spark appeared at Earth, stretching inward—to kiss the yellow line in tangent. “Now ain’t that sweet?”
“The initial burn looks to be fuel-intensive,” she said.
“Your initial burn is a couple of minutes longer because the rock has so many vees, incoming. You get four or five days on the asteroid before your delta-vee maneuver to reduce velocity so you can launch your satellites. Then you grab your Venus assist.”
Travis was watching his own moving pictures—diagramming the departure from the asteroid, the launch of the solar satellites, the loop around Venus—and his glee seemed genuine, that of a kid who had just brought off a complicated card trick.
Pitching her cheerfully, Travis froze the display. “You get two missions for the price of about one and a half.”
Robin glanced at Stith. “Has this been calculated?”
“Oh, yes,” he murmured tiredly. “All well within rated margins.”
Robin peered closely at Stith, who seemed to have drifted away from the conversation. That bothered her; even if he had already quizzed Travis extensively, it was not like Taylor to miss an opportunity to get his criticisms on record in front of a third party. She had participated in proposal reviews where Stith had been more eager to prove that a job was impossible than to talk about how it might succeed.
CAPAD 3
Detail of Travis’s CADPAD. showing approximate position of planets on July 15, 2023, proposed launch date of Starfire mission to rendezvous with Apollo object 2021 XA.
She turned back to Travis. “You’re a
ware that Starfire is an experimental vehicle—a dragster, a funny car, not a bus or a truck, not even the family station wagon. It goes like a bat out of hell over the short course, but total propulsion mass is a concern in—”
He cut in. “You’re sayin’ it’s overpowered and under-fueled.”
Stith winced at that, but Robin was watching Travis. “Let me put it this way,” she said. “When the Bell X-1 broke the sound barrier, it shot its wad. It was a rocket engine with wings, good for nothing except to go fast. We’re not quite that bad. We can carry a little extra weight; we can do some useful work. But we can’t afford to overreach our inherent limitations.”
“I’m not one to advocate overreachin’,” Travis assured her. “The mission profile I’m proposin’ involves no risks that aren’t inherent in your current plan.”
Robin uncapped a pen and started making notes on a yellow pad, pretending to study Travis’s presentation—although its implications, which went far beyond the paths of bodies in space, were already clear. She was not the first woman to command a U.S. spacecraft, but no woman before her had been assigned so important a mission, or one more coveted by NASA’s cadre of qualified astronaut commanders—an assignment that hadn’t been confirmed yet. Robin Braide resembled Taylor Stith in one isolated trait: she combined an active intelligence with an exaggerated respect for “systems,” what some would call office politics, which had done much to promote her rapid advancement within NASA. And she knew when the fix was in.
After a moment’s pause—for effect, studying her mostly meaningless notes—she looked at Travis with eyes shining. “Thanks for letting us see this. This is brilliant work.” Then she turned back to Stith. “The most exciting opportunity I’ve seen in a lifetime,” she said, staring at him, her tone of certainty enlivened by the thrill vibrating beneath it. What she said she meant, sort of, or else she could not have brought herself to say it, but she laid it on thick. “An opportunity to do extraordinary science at virtually no cost beyond the experiments and an accelerated training schedule. When can we put Planning and Studies to work? My people will want to get started on the new routines ASAP.”
Stith seemed mildly surprised. “We’re still discussing the proposal.”
“Oh, we’re past the proposal stage,” she said with conviction, taking some satisfaction from Stith’s guilty look. Indeed they were. “That’s how strongly I feel about it.”
“That’s…excellent, then.” Stith glanced at Travis. “I’m inclined to get this into detailed analysis as soon as possible. How flexible is your schedule?”
“Put me to work today if you need to,” Travis said cheerily.
“Well, soon, at any rate. Where can we reach you?”
“Next coupla days, King’s Inn.”
“We’ll call you, then.”
“Fine, Taylor. Robin, it’ll be good to work with you.” Travis stood and swiftly scooped up his diagrams and folded his CADPAD into its carrying case. He headed for the door, turning to beam at Stith before he left. “And if you don’t call me, I’ll surely be callin’ you.” The door closed firmly behind him.
Stith issued an angry groan. “That son of a bitch. Always has to have the last word.” Robin, startled, stifled the urge to laugh, while Stith recovered his composure. “Sorry. Just that…a few of his mannerisms rub me the wrong way.” Abruptly he pushed his chair back and stood up; he walked stiffly to the wide windows that looked down on the campus far below. “I’m relieved, glad I mean, that you’re enthusiastic about the asteroid rendezvous,” he said into the glass. “I’d pretty much made up my mind we ought to go for it, myself.”
“Too good to pass up,” she agreed.
“There will be a price,” he said. He didn’t seem eager to elaborate, and she thought it would be a mistake to press him. But after a moment, he went on. “Rendezvousing with an asteroid…to get the most out of the opportunity…your crew lacks expertise in exo-, uh, exogeology.”
“We have time to learn what we need. If we get started soon.”
“Well, it’s my judgment that a trained exogeologist is essential.”
“Let’s put one on. Too bad Hill’s not still in the astronaut corps, he could have done it himself.”
“Well, that’s an interesting suggestion about Hill, Robin.” Stith’s reply was quick. He turned away from the window. “He’s experienced. He certainly knows this particular subject better than anyone.”
“He was good, but he’s been gone too long,” she said firmly. “He’s out of condition. You saw that little pot. That’s where guys that shape store the excess booze.”
“Yes, that would eliminate him,” Stith muttered. “Yes, that would show up right away.”
“Why bother with him? There’s plenty of younger geo-scientists who are in the corps.”
Stith was pacing the room now, not facing her. “The other thing we have to face is…we aren’t going to be able to modify Starfire for a sixth crew member.”
“Why not? That much mass isn’t a problem,” said Robin.
“The specialist isn’t the problem, it’s the extra experiments—laser pulse drills, sounding rockets, seismic charges, extra antennas, RTGs, power panels—”
“You have details I don’t.”
“Hill’s recommendations. It all comes out of payload.”
“That calls for considerable engineering review—”
“It’s easier to train a geologist to launch a satellite,” he broke in, “than to train a software guy to do geology.”
Robin stopped doodling with the pen. “Taylor…whatever you’re working up to, I’d like you to give it to me straight.”
Stith looked at her over a tweedy shoulder. “If your crew does this mission—”
“If?”
“If your crew does this mission, Giles is out and Hill is in. Can you, personally, live with that?”
In the King’s Inn, a rambling two-story motel up the frontage road a couple of miles, Travis Hill was biding his time in a room overlooking a brilliant turquoise blue swimming pool, waiting for the phone to ring.
He hefted the barbells for the fifty-fifth—fifty-sixth—fifty-seventh time, his biceps turning to liquid fire. Sit-ups next; he intended to be rid of that belly flab in days.
A month ago if he’d been sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, he would have been plastered by now, even knowing the stakes. But he’d learned a trick, down there in the lowest depths of lower California. He’d learned that pain could be cultivated, could be made to substitute for chemical oblivion. Except for the hollow place where desire had lived, it made him feel almost as alive.
He knew they didn’t want him. He didn’t blame them.
Tough on them.
“Okay, the bolts are out, now we just tug on this, right?” Jimmy Giles’s intercom-muffled voice reached the instructors at their consoles four meters above his head, where they watched the progress of the training exercise on closed-circuit video.
In the green depths of the pool, a trio of masked and flippered frogmen hovered near Jimmy and Melinda, who were encased in white spacesuits; the big maneuvering units on their backs were dummies, of no use at all, just realistic enough to get in their way. The Weightless Environment Training Facility’s deep well of clear, filtered water provided the buoyancy essential to counteract the grosser effects of gravity—although brow sweat and dropped wrenches still fell toward the center of the Earth—and here the astronauts rehearsed their space-walk chores.
A tinny voice sounded in his headset. “That’s right, Colonel. That toggle to your left should just slip free.”
There was a mockup of one of Starfire’s external cargo bays next to one wall of the pool, and inside it, a big sheet-metal construction painted white, a dummy satellite. Bold black stenciled letters labeled it “Solar Probe 1”; its base was spangled with bright yellow radiation warnings, where the real probe’s nuclear engines were located. The purpose of this morning’s exercise was to practice manually unlockin
g the probe’s pivot mounting, which would be bolted fast during launch, in case the automatic deployment mechanisms failed.
Jimmy grabbed a protrusion on one edge of the pallet, curled his booted feet up against the wall, and pulled. Nothing moved. “Is that me, or the widget?”
“Hold still, Jimmy.” Melinda was floating close beside him. She crowded in and reached under his knees to push at the recalcitrant toggle. It folded, and the dummy satellite suddenly swung smoothly on its mounting.
“How did you do that?”
“I spit on my hands,” she said.
The instructor’s voice sounded in their helmets. “Let’s break off here. We’re hauling you two out.”
“Isn’t it a little early for lunch?” Melinda asked.
“Commander Braide’s orders.”
The frogmen moved in and, unencumbered by spacesuits and maneuvering units, tied off the dummy probe. Each took an astronaut by the elbow and swam upward, rising toward the narrow, shimmering surface of the pool far above their heads.
The astronauts’ padded white helmets emerged from the water, bulbous as the bronze pots worn by deep-sea divers. Around them, the surface of the pool took up a third of the floor space in a round steel building as big as a hangar. A crane lowered a wide swing into the water. Melinda and Jimmy climbed ponderously aboard and were lifted to the edge.
Robin was standing nearby on the wet cement, waiting for the helmets to come off. “What’s up, boss?” asked Jimmy. His voice echoed in the hollow building, mingling with the reverberating slap of wavelets.
“The deployment procedure is being modified—no point in practicing this. You get the morning off, Melinda. Jimmy, I need to talk a few things over with you when you’re dressed. I’ll bring my car around.”
Outside the WETF, the sunlight on the green grass and the white buildings was painfully bright; Houston’s humidity was doing its best to drown the locals in their own sweat. Jimmy dashed across the soft asphalt of the parking lot and slipped into the Porsche, where Robin was waiting with the turbine whining and the air conditioner on arctic.
