Starfire

by Unknown

  Lately he had begun to ponder the nature of machines, of the shiny spaceship of which he felt so much a part, which had proven so vulnerable to errors of logic; of the clockwork solar system with its inherent uncertainties; of the counterintuitive ability of humans to nudge fate. He had begun to wonder what his life might be like if things didn’t always go according to someone else’s plans. Maybe that’s what made him want to see his mother again, to tell her that he’d finally gotten the message he hadn’t wanted to accept from her before, that he was human after all.

  Along with his awakened human curiosity, he had discovered an unfamiliar zest for what each new day would bring. As he drifted into sleep, he found himself already eager for tomorrow.

  Clockwise from Spin, Robin too was trying to sleep. Her duties this day had been light, monitoring the ship, keeping track of the work parties, attempting to communicate with ever-more-distant Earth through repeated violent solar disturbances.

  She knew all the ship’s measurable dimensions in “readiness space” to several places past the decimal, so she could stow that worry. Her thoughts were on her crew.

  On Linwood, under increasing physical stress.

  On Spin, with his blossoming desire to be a person instead of a machine, something he had discovered for himself yesterday or the day before, it seemed, although his hope had been discernible to Robin long before that.

  On Travis, still torn between the urge for companionship and the need to be utterly alone, emerging painfully and with unpredictable starts and stops from his fibrous emotional cocoon.

  On Melinda. She was in love, and it hurt to watch.

  “In love,” detestable phrase, but the condition it described was serious. Melinda watched Travis all the time he was visible, challenged him, provoked him, made jokes, bid for his attention. And he carefully avoided her.

  Robin, if she had known Travis well enough, might have been able to intervene with some subtlety. But she knew Melinda much better than she knew Travis, knew her whole vita: Punahou School, Carnegie-Mellon, MIT—valedictorian, cum laude, summa cum laude—NASA research grant, group achievement award, desperate achiever, addicted winner. Double-bound by her entrepreneur father, the billionaire video capitalist and superjock amateur racer, the master of sarcasm, the perfect asshole, that father of hers without an untrimmed line or a hemorrhoid or a visible emotion.

  Melinda’s striving for perfection never acknowledged by her father, not once—always dismissed with a sneering “How nice, what a surprise, such a sweet little girl”—her serious, determined striving for perfection, never once acknowledged by her father. What extraordinary calm she exhibited, sliding through NASA’s psychiatric review, letting the desire show, disguising the need. How many questions must she have endured on the subject of her older brother, driven to suicide—“driven” not too strong a word, despite whatever nastiness her brother may have been nursing in his own hothouse psyche—driven to suicide by their father’s demand for perfection.

  And so we all support Melinda, Robin reflected, and respect her for all the things she does so well, and find ourselves helpless on her account when she comes up against the wall.

  Melinda. Travis. Not as old as he pretended, or even as old as he looked, but worn and experienced enough to have a good opinion worth her coveting. She craving that final gold star. He pretending, for what reason Robin did not know, that love was foreign to him, and thus pretending that Melinda did not exist.

  Perfectly suited to break each other’s hearts, if by some miracle they survived the passage of the sun.

  Clockwise from Robin, sleepless Travis tried to concentrate on the engineering problems that faced them, the excavations, the planting of charges, the tricky matter of removing 225,000 cubic meters of debris from a hole big enough to swallow a rocketship. His imagination ran instead to Melinda’s curly hair, her freckled nose, her muscular legs and arms in the shorts and T-shirt she often wore around the cabin…

  Turning his head, he could just glimpse, past the edge of the curtain, a wedge of Melinda’s sleeping form, upside down across the corridor. Her hair was floating around her head; her arms were raised like an operatic sleepwalker’s.

  He tried the mind-emptying trick, the one where you say “One…one…one…” over and over, with the intention of discarding any coherent thoughts that arise in the process. Great trick, but it never did work.

  He sighed and stared at the white canvas padding of his sleeping compartment, a few centimeters away from where he floated in his sleep restraint. He stopped struggling. He would either go to sleep or he wouldn’t.

  He turned his head again and peeked across the corridor.

  In the last of the sleeping compartments, Linwood’s sleep was deep and dreamless.

  22

  In the slow dark days that followed, Starfire remained in the line of sight of Earth, still enjoying the shelter of the black mountain that rolled beneath the ship a little less than once in half a day. Even with anomalously high levels of solar activity and the sun shining fully into the Earth’s antennas, the ship was able to maintain sketchy communications with NASA—communications, however, that were more successful for high-speed, highly redundant streams of telemetry than for ordinary voice communication. So Houston and Starfire gave up talking to each other, except for perfunctory daily words of mutual encouragement.

  Sent as telemetry, Jimmy Giles’s software corrections were received and written into the ship’s programs by Melinda and Linwood a day after the two of them finished reassembling the heat-transfer unit. They queried the computers: according to Starfire, the ship was ready to fly. Had not a deep suspicion of Starfire’s software infected the astronauts, the word might have been more reassuring.

  In any event it was too late to take the easy way home. All the mass-energy remaining in the hydrogen and lithium tanks could not have lifted Starfire from the whirlpool of the sun’s gravitational field by main force.

  The sun drew closer and shone brighter; on the surface of Everest the temperature continued to rise. Long a stranger to the inner solar system, the asteroid at its heart was frozen to within a few dozen degrees of absolute zero. The chill rock was approaching the sun so swiftly that warmth had penetrated no more than a few centimeters of its husk, but already the astronauts were daily entertained by luminous jets of glowing gas on the near horizon, plumes of vapor sublimed from watery pockets in Everest’s red hemisphere.

  After three days of work Travis and Spin had drilled all their holes and planted all their charges. They returned to the ship. Travis watched over Spin’s shoulder as the flight deck screens displayed the asteroid rolling slowly under the ship. The target inched up below them. Spin pushed a button. There was a jolt, a confused slurry of rock and dust outlining a wide circle, debris floating above the surface in a slowly sifting cloud. Much of it would take days to disperse.

  They climbed back into their stinking spacesuits and went down to the surface again.

  The good results were confirmed: with well-placed charges they had cut a plug in the crumbling coal-and-ice side of Everest thirty meters across, and a hundred and fifty meters deep—a plug of frozen rock longer by half than a football field, fitted into the side of the asteroid like a cork in a bottle. Force would be needed to pop that cork: a powerful explosion from beneath or a long, slow, steady pull from above.

  They opted for the steady pull. Although they still had high explosives in their seismographic kit, they would need them later, beyond the sun. Their corkscrew was a solar probe, one of the two satellites Starfire should have launched days earlier, satellites that were looking more like NASA surplus with each passing hour.

  The probes had been intended to orbit close to the sun, where they would have been constantly buffeted by unpredictable shock waves in the corona. Throughout their useful life they would have had to point their carbon-carbon heat shields at the sun’s center with great precision—so close to the sun they could not deviate from true vertical by even
two degrees without burning out their instruments. In order to maintain stability in the seething solar environment, each probe was equipped with neutral-beam ion thrusters, their power supplied by compact nuclear reactors intended to operate for a decade.

  Now it was apparent that those clever thruster systems would never see duty around the sun. But they could still lift a mass of rock from the side of Everest.

  One probe was enough. Travis and Spin ditched its heat shield, settled it in the center of the plug, spiked it to the ground; they brought its reactor to critical, reprogrammed it, set its X- and Y-thrusters to compensate for the asteroid’s lazy spin, set its Z-thrusters to spewing neutralized ions in a steady, undeviating stream. Lifted on this persistent thrust, the cork slowly emerged from the bottle. Where corners of the massive plug hung up, Travis and Spin aimed bursts of laser-drill fire to free them. They slaved at the task for two days.

  After final hours of sweat-drenching labor, Travis was able to stand lightly on the surface of Everest and look up as a rough cylinder of frozen water and blackened stone finally eased clear of Everest, to hang in space like a flying acropolis in a Magritte painting. Beneath that soaring hill, a blacker well had opened in Everest, surrounded by a hazy cloud of detritus. Through the debris Starfire must descend and then pull down a blanket of stones over its head, to cover it against the fire to come.

  Melinda and Robin had their heads together in NAVCOM.

  “Adjusted orbital data from NASA,” Melinda said. “If Everest is falling the way they say it is”—on the screen the orange line looped in and past the sun—“we’re in trouble.”

  “What’s the difference from before?”

  “Not much in delta-vees. Maybe only a hundred meters per second or so. The problem is the shape of the curve.”

  “Show it to me again,” Robin said.

  PERIGEE

  Approximate position of planets at perigee, August 15, 2023.

  “Here. On a pass this tight our last window for Mercury is seven hours past perigee. At that point we’re only six solar radiuses from the sun. We can’t come out of Everest—we’d melt.”

  “Once more,” Robin said.

  Again the trajectories unspooled on the screen as Melinda watched. “Yes, it’s a problem.”

  Robin said, “Well, the numbers may change again.”

  Melinda said nothing.

  The word went around. By dinner time everyone had made the pilgrimage to the NAVCOM computer to look at the graphics and the data runstreams for themselves. Dinner that night—choice of beef steak w/rice pilaf or beef w/barbecue sauce and green beans w/mushrooms—was a dreary affair.

  Travis had the cleanup detail. With his feet snugged into loops on the floor, he deftly fished the trays out of the discard basket and carefully scraped them under the suction hood of the disposal, before inserting them in the sterilizer. He was conscious of Melinda watching him as he worked, dawdling over her dinner plate. His thoughts were not exclusively upon her, however. He was pondering their dilemma: even if they survived the sun, it now appeared they would not have enough energy to catch Mercury and use its gravity to steer themselves back to Earth—Earth, which by the time they could afford to emerge from hiding would be fleeing from them, halfway across the solar system. They needed extra energy. His thoughts returned to the sturdy little solar probes…

  Crossing the wardroom with her plate of abandoned rice pilaf, Melinda tangled with a floating seat cushion; as she batted at it, the rice scattered like sticky shrapnel—all over Travis. “Oh, God dammit!”

  He turned and made a nasty face.

  “You think it’s funny?” she cried. When he grinned, all teeth, her embarrassment flamed into rage. “Clean it up yourself, then.”

  Nodding solemnly, he unlatched the vacuum hose and started carefully sucking the mess off himself and out of the air. She relented and tried to help. His solemnity didn’t last; he couldn’t keep from laughing.

  “Damn you, Travis.” She launched herself out of the room.

  She sought refuge in NAVCOM, only to find Robin there ahead of her, running numbers on the computer. Linwood, across the corridor, was deep in thought. She tried to excuse herself, but Robin stopped her. “Don’t go.”

  “I didn’t really have anything to—”

  “Melinda, stay here. Talk to me.”

  Melinda stayed, taking it as an order, trying to hide her tears. Linwood glanced up and Robin glared at him; he coughed discreetly and extracted himself from PROP. Robin glanced at the comm screen; Spin was on the flight deck, staring at the big screen, a plug in his ear, listening to an audio chip. He had taken to living up there, communing with the ship.

  “Will you talk to me?” Robin asked softly.

  For a long time Melinda didn’t want to say anything. Tears were pressing at the back of her eyelids, words were pressing at her throat, but she hated what they would sound like. Why make herself naked? “We’re going to die,” she said.

  “You mean because we can’t go home?” asked Robin, speaking quietly, distinctly. “Because we’re going to bury ourselves in this rock, and this rock is going to burn to a cinder?”

  Melinda laughed through her tears, startled, offended. “Yeah.”

  “And…?”

  “And that’s not the worst of it,” Melinda said, bobbing her head.

  “What’s the worst of it?”

  Melinda turned away, rubbing at her forehead.

  Robin persisted. “That over-the-hill cowboy doesn’t know you’re alive? Is that the worst of it?” She flicked the comm screen to the wardroom, where Travis was stowing the last of the dishes.

  “Fucking ludicrous,” Melinda agreed, crying harder.

  Robin let Melinda float into the comfort of her embrace. Melinda’s breath came in constricted heaves; after a moment the sighs flowed, the groans issued—

  —and then she was giggling again. “Jesus, let’s talk about something minimally significant.”

  “Okay,” said Robin. “How about this: we aren’t going to die.”

  Melinda sniffed. “I wish…I wish I didn’t know better.”

  “I mean it,” Robin said. “I’ve been studying the runstreams…”

  Travis was about to leave the wardroom when Linwood appeared. “Say, Doc, there’s somethin’ I’d like—”

  “Later, please. I’m trying to think this through.”

  “Oh, okay. Sure.” Be that way, Travis thought. He pushed himself into the corridor and moved upward.

  He rose to the level of NAVCOM. “Say, Robin,” Travis began, “there’s somethin’—” In the indirect light it took him a moment to realize he was interrupting a private conversation. “Guess this is a bad time.”

  Melinda freed herself from Robin and smiled at him. Her face was smeared with tears that had no place to fall. “Go ahead. We had our talk.”

  Travis was already drifting away. He stopped himself. “Well, in that case—Robin, I’ve been thinkin’ about this potential delta-vee situation…”

  “Do me a favor and sit on it a few minutes,” she said. She flicked a switch on the comm panel, sending her voice throughout the ship. “Spin, Linwood, we need a meeting right now. In the wardroom.”

  Robin maneuvered past Travis and moved down the corridor. Travis and Melinda were left staring at each other. Her eyes were red above her pink and freckled nose. This time the look she gave him held no challenge. “I’m sorry I made such a mess. With the food, and…”

  “Hey.” He plucked at his sweat-soaked, soil-stiffened jacket. “Time I took this outfit to the cleaners anyway.”

  “We’ve all had a look at the data Houston sent up. The orbital corrections are minor, based on the refined mass estimates we gave them. The consequences for us, however, are significant. We can’t wait until two days past perigee to leave Everest, as we’d assumed. It looks like our last opportunity is going to be seven hours, maybe pushing eight hours, past perihelion. Exposed, that close, only the engine structures and th
e radiators will be able to withstand incident radiation—and how efficient the radiators would be…” She let the sentence dangle. “No matter. The solar disk will still take up some fifteen angular degrees in the sky. Even perfectly aligned, end on to the sun, the tanks”—and, as she did not have to remind them, everything above the tanks, including the crew module—“will be above the shadow cone.” She smiled. “So we’ve got this minor technical problem: at P plus eight, we can’t come out of our hole.”

  Linwood said, “I have been giving the matter some thought.” Then he paused, as he customarily did, to marshall his sentences.

  Into the pregnant silence Robin said, “I’ll be interested to know if—”

  But Travis, whose eyes had been growing brighter throughout her speech, could not sit on it any longer. “Folks, there’s a hell of a lot of energy stowed on this ship that we haven’t thought of yet.”

  “Propulsion is your department, Linwood,” Robin said.

  “Hm, well,” Linwood said, “it has occurred to me that the solar probe satellites are equipped with nuclear-powered ion-drive attitude stabilization systems.”

  “Hell,” muttered Travis, chagrined. “I guess we did.”

  Spin and Melinda glanced at each other. Satellites? So?

  “Now, in the short time remaining to us,” Linwood continued, “the ion drives are of insufficient thrust to impart the necessary incremental velocity change to Everest…”

  Spin and Melinda looked at each other again. Delta-vees to Everest?

  “…however, the reactors themselves are fueled by the fissile isotope of uranium, U 235.”