Analog SFF, June 2011 (12 page)

"Marcus, I'll get us a table. Patrick, will you join us for dinner?"

Which part of
astrophysicist
was unclear? “I don't plan to stay late tonight,” Patrick lied.

Besides, Valerie did not need a chaperone. Patrick wondered if Judson would become a regular with her too. Everyone would know when Judson stopped getting a room in the Res Hall for his weekend visits. Green Bank was a small town, and the observatory staff was even tinier.

"If you change your mind,” Valerie persisted, then strode off for the dining room.

Eric ambled back, setting down two wineglasses. “I started you a tab, Professor."

"Thanks.” Judson picked up the glasses, took a step away from the bar, and stopped. “Tough break,” he said softly.

The Tigers had just left two men stranded on base. “Jankowski is on fire this season,” Patrick said. “ERA of what, around two-nine?"

"That's not what I meant."

"Aren't you on a date?” Patrick asked. He turned, pointedly, back to the Yankees/Tigers game.

If there was one thing Patrick could not abide, it was sympathy.

Valerie slid back her plate, pleasantly full. “That was excellent."

"That was a salad,” Marcus said, as though disagreeing.
He
had had a sirloin with a loaded baked potato, and all that remained on his plate was a sprig of parsley. Maybe only half a sprig. “How about some dessert?"

He ate like a force of nature, but if she skipped dessert so would he. “I'd split one.” One bite was splitting.

"What do you recommend?"

"Pretty much any of the desserts.” As in:
you
pick. Because you studied the dessert choices before you ever looked at entrées. And because you're going to be eating most of it.

Why was dating so complicated?

"How about the death-by-chocolate cake, then. With a scoop of ice cream?"

"That sounds good.” And maybe
two
bites.

"So, about Patrick."

She had wondered when Patrick would come up. “He's a planetary astronomer. I think you two would get along. He's not always so . . ."

"Cranky? Surly? Belligerent?"

"I was going to say gruff.” The waitress came by to clear the dinner plates and took their dessert order. Valerie figured she could change topics. Patrick was so . . . sad. “Simon came home from school today with the funniest story."

"Hold that thought. I have a question about him. Patrick, I mean. What was with the disclaimer when I mentioned Phoebe bots?"

"Honestly? I don't know. It's odd. He used to rent bots quite often. But it's true that he didn't encourage me to try bots myself."

The waitress returned with their coffees, their dessert, and two forks. Marcus moved the plate into the center of the table. “What does he do at Green Bank?"

"Mostly maintenance, and some training of visiting astronomers. With authorization you can schedule observations over the Internet, but we don't give out those codes to anyone till they've trained onsite.” Three bites, she decided, taking a fork. “Do you know his history?"

"Yeah.” Marcus's eyes widened with his first bite of cake. “Not the kind of incident I would forget. Ex-JPL. Broke basic ops protocol, and in the process lost a deep-space probe."

"I think that's oversimplified.” She fidgeted with her napkin, searching for the right words. Patrick had confided in her, just a little, once when she had really needed the distraction. “Suppose he had gone through channels, that he had submitted a proposed maneuver. Suppose that while he waited for a review committee to approve, the spacecraft got whacked by an oncoming rock.” The inward-streaking pebble that, Patrick had said, could not be found in what remained of the final telemetry after his hasty upload. “Would that be better?"

"No one second-guesses waiting for channels.” Marcus, wearing a sudden sour expression, set down his fork. “And when something was everyone's responsibility, that makes it no one's fault. Okay, I might have acted too. More carefully, I would like to think. And without wiping the comm buffer afterward to try to cover my tracks."

"He's my
friend
, Marcus.” And loss of Patrick's family, career, and the respect of his peers was too steep a penalty.

Patrick had been in her office the day two marines in full dress blues showed up. As Patrick had been there for her for long days after. Merely, quietly,
there
, not driven off, as were so many, by the embarrassment of not knowing what to say.

A good man hid beneath all that rancor. She felt Patrick's pain.

And in a rush, her own. She still missed Keith terribly. She wished her son could have known his father, taken away when Simon was just learning, stumblingly, to walk. But in an instant, a roadside bomb in Afghanistan had changed . . . everything.

What was she doing on a
date
?

Keith would want her to get on with her life, but she felt miserable. She tried to keep the turmoil off her face and knew she had failed.

"Sorry,” Marcus said, looking confused at her mood swing. “Are you all right?"

"Just . . . distracted."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"No,” she insisted.

Marcus took the hint. “So Patrick doesn't observe anymore?"

She wrung her napkin some more. “Not officially.” Because Patrick's proposals for time on the scopes seldom got approved. “But training involves targets, and he picks the aim points. His students end up tracking lots of objects in the outer asteroid belt."

"Outer belt,” Marcus repeated. “Meaning?"

"Beyond the ice line. Distant enough from the Sun that ice doesn't melt or sublimate."

"Listening for the beacon of the Verne probe, you mean. After, what, eight years?"

"Nine,” she corrected. How absurd were the odds Patrick would ever hear it? Space was
big
. And who knew if the lost spacecraft even still functioned? “I know. It's sad."

"Poor guy."

The waitress topped off their coffees. Valerie wrapped her hands around her cup to warm them. Not that the room was cold.

"I think I should be getting you home,” Marcus said. “You look . . . tired."

She opened her mouth, but an explanation refused to come. Dragging out the evening would not be fair to him. “You're right,” she managed at last. “Sorry."

The drive home to Green Bank continued in awkward silence. She broke it by babbling about how in 1960 Green Bank hosted one of the first academically respectable SETI meetings. SETI was one of Patrick's avowed passions, and she launched into describing the transmitter module—never installed, of course—that he had designed and built in his spare time for the big dish. He often puttered after hours in the electronics shop.

Only no one she knew believed Patrick gave a flying fig about SETI, or that he had spent months getting ready to send a reply to some hypothetical aliens. What everyone understood—and no one would ever raise with Patrick—was the thing for which he
did
prepare: the day he detected the Verne probe's beacon. Each year, as that hope seemed more forlorn, he spent less time tinkering with the idle transmitter.

Her voice trailed off. She and Marcus completed the drive in uncomfortable silence.

They finally turned into her driveway. Light flickered in the windows, Brianna watching 3-V. Then a little figure bounded past the living-room window: Simon, wide awake. Valerie fancied she heard little-boy engine noises. The dashboard clock, as she sneaked a peek, read 8:46. She was pathetic.

"I'm sorry,” she told Marcus, yet again, as he walked her to her door. “I'm not fit company tonight. May I call you in the morning? Maybe we can go for brunch."

"Sure. I can stay till noon or so. Big meeting Monday to prepare for."

He didn't offer details and she didn't ask. The powersat, quite accidentally, had brought them together. It would not keep them together. It was, like Keith, a subject they did not discuss.

The two unmentioned elephants in the room.

On the porch, Marcus gave her a perfunctory kiss goodnight. “Will you be okay?"

"Sure.” She forced a smile. Someday.

Thursday, May 18

Slicing the tops off whitecaps, a sleek, thirty-foot hovercraft raced along the Santa Barbara Channel. In the distance, rugged and pristine, stood one of the islands of Channel Islands National Park. Santa Cruz Island, if Dillon correctly remembered the map. The sky was almost painfully bright. Sun sparkled off the waves.

"Southern California hardly counts as the tropics,” Kayla Jorgenson shouted over the roar of the engine. Her tan Dockers, starched blue blouse, and L. L. Bean windbreaker might as well have been a business suit. She had pulled her hair back into a short ponytail. Only white knuckles as she clenched the handrail betrayed nerves. “This time of the year surface-water temperature only approaches sixty degrees, so the test bed won't reach the output levels the system would achieve near the equator. We still get a temperature differential, with respect to the bottom of the intake pipe, better than twenty degrees. The results we're measuring match our simulations quite well. That said, to unambiguously prove the technology, we would like to deploy a full-scale demo system somewhere warmer."

If we get the money
, she managed to convey without uttering the words.

Dillon tugged his cap lower. Despite Ray-Bans and the cap's long visor, he squinted against the glare. He was a captive audience on the small boat, and Kayla was not one to waste face time. He remembered his first impression of her: focused.

They could have choppered to the demo site a lot faster, but after crisscrossing the country, flying from one cash-hungry start-up to the next, Dillon had opted for sunshine and sea breezes. His face turned toward the afternoon sun, closing his eyes, he thought tanned thoughts.

He was exhausted. Already that week he had toured a lithium-ion automotive battery plant in Saginaw, a superconducting-cable company outside Chicago, a scale-model geothermal power plant in Nevada, and, only the day before, a Silicon Valley semiconductor design shop with some ideas for improving solar cells. The score so far for the week: dud, promising, dud, and
scary
. Cortez Photovoltaic used chemical dopants and industrial processes that made him nervous as hell. An anonymous tip to the EPA should slow that bunch for a while.

"Besides the convenient location,” Kayla kept going, inexorably, “reusing the drilling rig really slashed our upfront costs. All we had to do was lower pipe, something any oil platform is already configured to do. If we extend this concept to . . ."

When Dillon next opened his eyes, the platform, which had been only a dot on the horizon, had swelled into a massive, looming construction.

Oil drilling in the Santa Barbara Channel: madness. Merely to see this oil rig filled him with rage, but he bottled the anger. He could almost wish the Crudetastrophe had tainted the reservoir deep beneath his feet.

Like the drilling platform itself, ocean thermal energy conversion was an enormous undertaking. He felt the throb before he heard it. As they raced toward the old oil platform, the pulsing grew and grew.

"You'll want these,” Kayla said. Her left hand came out of her jacket pocket with two pairs of earplugs. “Anti-noise. They cancel repetitive low-pitched sounds like what our big pump makes."

Not much use to fish, porpoises, or whales.
They
were screwed. One of the staff engineers Dillon had tasked to vet Jorgenson's pitch had brought up the noise issue. Her guesstimate was that underwater noise from an OTEC plant would exceed ambient levels for a good mile from the platform.

The Santa Barbara Channel was summer home to about ten percent of the world's blue-whale population. What about
them
?

But Kayla was right about the earplugs. The throbbing all but disappeared once Dillon had his pair in place.

She was still pitching OTEC when the hovercraft, settling into the water, coasted up to the platform's floating dock. The oil platform—an all-but-incomprehensible maze of girders and pipes, catwalks and steel plates—loomed over Dillon. High above, enormous derricks reached far out over the channel.

Twenty feet above the waves, where a spidery catwalk hugged one of the platform's massive support posts, a worker in hard hat and orange coveralls stood waiting. Projecting outward and upward, held almost vertical by taut steel cables, was what could only be a raised gangplank.

Kayla shouted out a string of numbers, and the roustabout released the brake of a winch. With a whirr of gears the gangplank pivoted and began to descend. The floating dock bucked and slued as, with a
thud
, the foot of the ramp struck.

"Nice drawbridge.” Dillon gestured at ocean all around. “And one hell of a moat."

"We don't want uninvited guests, obviously,” Kayla said. “We change pass codes daily."

As the dock's wobble dampened out, Coverall Guy loped down the gangplank to meet them. While he and crew secured the hovercraft, Dillon kept looking around. A wire-mesh cage bobbed nearby, buoyed by pontoons at the corners. Peering over the hovercraft's side, wondering what the enclosure was and how deep it extended, he was startled by dark, darting shapes within. They had to be two feet long, at least.

"What
are
those?” he asked, pointing.

"Alaskan sockeye salmon,” Kayla said, grinning at his double-take. “Some of the cold water we've brought to the rig gets vented through the aquaculture units. That should be good for some extra income from the local seafood joints. We're thinking we might farm Maine lobsters in another cage."

While the chilled water spewing from the rig did what to the indigenous species? Fish farming was not the insult to nature of many ventures he saw, and the shadow of an oil platform was hardly a native habitat, but still the caged salmon saddened him.

Dillon followed Kayla up the gangplank, rising and falling with the floating dock, to the lowest catwalk. From there their route was hand over hand, rung by rung, straight up the massive pillar. When they reached the bottom deck he tried not to look through the metal grating to the surging waves far below.