Ark (11 page)

22

H
olle said, “What?” Liu seemed quite calm. He even smiled. “Ms. Groundwater. Once, in my class, we were ruminating on a design problem that at the time seemed insuperable.”

“I—”

“The size of the warp bubble.”

“Yes. I remember.”

“On that occasion, you raised a question. Not a solution, but it provoked a chain of thought that ultimately led to a solution. It was a good question. Perhaps that is your particular talent.” His smile widened, encouraging. “Now would be a good time to ask that question again.”

Patrick said, “What the hell are you doing, Liu? What kind of pressure is that to put on a seventeen-year-old kid?”

“It’s OK, Dad,” Holle said, though it wasn’t OK, not at all. They were all staring at her, her father with anxiety and pride, Liu with intensity, Edward Kenzie with bafflement—Kelly with frank envy. She could feel her heart hammer, the blood sing in her ears. She thought she might faint. What a situation. Speak. Say the right thing. Or else in five years you’ll either be dead, or starving on a raft made of plastic trash. “It’s just something my father always said. If the answer’s not the one you want, maybe you’re asking the wrong question.”

Liu Zheng closed his eyes and spoke rapidly. “Yes. OK. Now we have two apparently insuperable obstacles. First, the antimatter. We can’t make what we need. Then what’s the alternative to making it?”

Jerzy growled, “If you can’t make it, go find it. Mine it from somewhere.”

“Yes,” Liu said, nodding. “The question is, where and how? And second, the multiple launches. We don’t have the time to launch the Ark in fifteen pieces. Surely you are right about that, Colonel. Therefore we will have to send up a single package, a single launch, the whole Ark. Eighty people with everything to sustain them,
and
all the aspects of the ship’s propulsion system. All to be launched at once. How do you launch so much to orbit, in one shot?” He opened his eyes and started to hammer at the keypad in the tabletop before him.

Jerzy was smiling, a twisted gesture under his covered eye. “I see what you mean. Those are good questions. And I think I know where you can mine antimatter.”

Gordo had to grin. “Is this a setup? You old showboater.”

“I am younger than
you,
Colonel.”

“Where?”

And Jerzy said, “Jupiter and Io.”

Jupiter, a monstrous world with the mass of three hundred Earths, so huge it was almost a star. And Io, moon of Jupiter, circling so close to its bloated parent that tidal forces kneaded it into continual volcanism. As Io circled through Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field it created a “flux tube,” an electric current connecting Io to Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, a current that gathered up charged particles and caused them to slam into the Jovian air.

Kelly, racing through material retrieved to the screen before her, saw the point quickly. “The flux tube is a natural particle collider.”

Jerzy said, “And as such it is a natural source of antimatter particles. Of course in nature such particles will annihilate with matter very quickly, but it is believed that some finish up in belts around Jupiter, analogous to Earth’s Van Allen belts. And if they could be harvested—”

“How?” Gordo snapped.

“With some kind of superconducting magnetic scoop, possibly,” Liu said. “A ship with magnetic sails that could waft through the flux tube and filter out antiprotons. The amount of antimatter is small—only three or four tons of antimatter per hour are created by such processes across the solar system—but the amount we will need to harness is small too . . .”

And the discussion spun on as the scientists, running with the idea, explored the resources available through their computers. Even Kelly and Mel joined in, exhilarated to be released from the closure and intensity of the post-accident discussion.

Holle just sat back, bewildered. She tried to follow the swirling discussion, the bare outlines of a new mission strategy emerging from the heated speculation. Jupiter’s environment, saturated with radiation, was pretty lethal for humans. That plucky ramjet, swooping in around Io to filter out antiprotons, would have to be unmanned. But it might be controlled by a manned craft in a slow, remote orbit around Jupiter. So you would spend years in orbit, living in a tank, years in a place of huge, lethal energies where the sun was reduced to dimness, years waiting just to collect the antimatter needed to begin the mission proper. It seemed horrible to her, repellent, utterly inhuman. And yet, as the scientists talked, as Gordo let the discussion run on, this was the consensus that was emerging.

But how would you get to Jupiter in the first place?

For answer, Liu Zheng produced a video clip which he projected onto the big whiteboard at the front of the room. It was only half a minute long, and looped over and over. Scratchy, blurred, ghosted from having been copied across many formats, it showed an old man sitting in a rocking chair. He cradled some kind of model. It looked like an artillery shell, maybe a meter long, a third of a meter wide. The old man displayed the features of the gadget. That bullet-like cowl was made of fiberglass, and was pocked with holes where, it seemed, some kind of sensors had once been placed. At the base was a curved plate of aluminum, like a pie dish, or maybe an antenna. The dish was connected to the main body by a system of springs, a kind of suspension.

“This is how we may launch,” Liu said.

Jerzy Glemp cackled. “In a Jules Verne spaceship?”

“It has nothing to do with Verne,” said Liu. “But it is a spaceship—or a demonstration model of one.” He froze the image. “It was driven by explosives. You set off a charge under your pusher plate, there. The plate is driven up into the suspension system, which in turn pushes the main body forward. And you set off another charge, and another.” He mimed this with his hands, his curved left palm catching the imaginary detonations, the back of his hand pushing his right fist up in the air. “Boom, boom, boom. With this model, the charges were the size of golf balls.”

Gordo covered his face with his big hands. “Oh, shit, I heard of this. My father showed me a scratchy old film, of this thing put-putting into the air . . . What was it called?”

Edward Kenzie said, “Are you suggesting this might be the way to launch our Ark? What kind of explosions would you need?”

“Thermonuclear,” Liu said simply.

“Jesus Christ,” Kenzie said, and he looked at his daughter, horrified. “You’re seriously suggesting we load the last hope of mankind on top of a nuclear bomb?”

“Not just one bomb,” Liu said, unperturbed. “Several. A whole stream of them, thrown behind the pusher plate and detonated—”

“Project Orion,” Gordo snapped.

With that as the key, the others began digging into the electronic archives.

Holle quickly found that Orion had been run from 1957 to 1965 by General Atomic, a division of a company that had also built nuclear submarines and Atlas ICBMs. It was a time of extravagant dreams driven by the new technology of thermonuclear detonations, the energies of the sun brought down to Earth. One “dimensional analysis,” pushing the idea as far as possible, predicted that it would be possible to have sent humans to Saturn by 1970. She flashed the report to the whiteboard.

“This is serious stuff,” Kelly said, wondering. “They got support from Los Alamos, Livermore, Sandia. And look at all these technical papers: ‘A Survey of the Shock Absorber Problem.’ ‘Random Walk of Trajectory Due to Bomb Misplacement.’ Some of these are still classified!”

Gordo said, “So would this have worked?”

“You bet,” Mel Belbruno said. “I mean, you bet, sir. They never quite wrestled the technical details to the floor, as far as I can see. But the concept was surely sound. And they did fly a few demonstration models with conventional explosives.”

“So why weren’t we at Saturn by 1970?”

“Because,” Liu Zheng said, “to get to Saturn, you must first leave the Earth.”

Growing opposition to nuclear weapons through the 1960s caused the Orion concept to be viewed with suspicion. The final straw was an unwise presentation to President Kennedy of a model of a spaceborne Orion-technology battleship, bristling with nuclear missiles. Kennedy was disgusted.

“So the concept was mothballed. But it was never abandoned,” Liu said. “You will see that NASA later developed a successor design called ‘Extended Pulsed Plasma Propulsion,’ with a greater distance from weapons technology.”

“I guess it was always a good concept to have in the library,” said Gordo. “If you ever needed to get something big off of the Earth quickly.” He rubbed his eyes. “I think I remember a novel from when I was a kid. The aliens attack, and we use Orion to get at their mother ship.
Footfall
—something like that. Shame it isn’t a bunch of aliens we got to beat now. Xenobaths or newts or aquaphibians. By comparison, that would be easy.”

“There is, or was, a nuclear weapons plant close to Denver,” Jerzy Glemp said. “At Rocky Flats.”

Gordo laughed. “Why ain’t I surprised you know that? But if President Vasquez won’t back the idea of another antimatter factory in the middle of Denver, how do I get her to endorse building a whole fucking spaceship out of nuclear bombs?”

“And the fallout,” Patrick said earnestly. “If such a thing is launched anywhere in what’s left of the continental US—there is nowhere empty of people, certainly not in Colorado.”

Jerzy said grimly, “If we launch in 2040, or 2041, or 2042, that will no longer matter, Mr. Groundwater. And nor, I am afraid, will those left behind.”

The paramedic who monitored Jerzy had been following the discussion. Holle had never seen such bewilderment, such shock, on any human face, as they discussed spaceships driven by nuclear fire. Holle wondered if they had all gone insane.

23

H
olle had grown up with the flood. She had no memories of life before, how politics used to be. But even so she was surprised by the speed of President Vasquez’s decision-making.

Just two days after Gordo’s session, Vasquez appeared on TV and the web. Once the funerals and proper commemorations were done, she said, Project Nimrod would continue. The Ark would fly, if it was humanly possible to make that happen. That was her promise to the crew and those who were working on the project. And she promised further that there would be no repeat of the Byers accident, that the safety of the public would be paramount. (“Until launch day,” Kelly Kenzie muttered cynically.)

But there was a price to pay. It seemed that the President had had to make considerable concessions to win over dissenters about Project Nimrod within her own administration. She, Vasquez, would not stand for a further reelection at that fall’s election. It would have been her sixth term. She would step aside and endorse her vice president as a candidate.

And Jerzy Glemp would be removed from the project he had initiated, and face charges relating to his culpability for the Byers accident.

In the Academy, Holle was oblivious to the reaction of the students, their whooping celebrations, the way Harry Smith pushed through the crowd to get to a stunned Zane Glemp. All she could think was that the project was on, that the Ark would be built. That she might yet get to fly.

24

December 2038

A
fter one last night in the Boulder training center they were bundled into the chunky biofueled bus that was to take them up into the Wilderness for the shuttle crash sim: Holle, Kelly, Susan, Venus, Mel, Zane, Matt, and DPD officer Don, here in his semi-regular role as unofficial shotgun. Don took his place up front, at the driver’s position, though the bus was automated and knew its own way to the training site. Kelly sat up front beside Don.

Holle made her way to the back of the bus, where Mel was waiting for her. She shuffled down the bus, clumsy in her bright orange environment suit. They had already been in the suits for three days in the training center set up in the old National Center for Atmospheric Research, with hoods up and face masks and goggles in place throughout. They looked like medics heading for a plague zone, she thought vaguely. Even Don had volunteered to live in a suit for the duration of the exercise, even though he was never going to have to wear such a thing in anger. As she sat down Mel grinned and took her hand. His face was all but invisible behind his breathing mask and scuffed plastic goggles, and his human warmth didn’t penetrate the glove layers.

The massive door closed with a hiss of hydraulics. The bus pulled out of the NCAR parking lot, flanked by a couple of light armored vehicles. Like most government vehicles, the heavy bus was plated with armor heavy enough to absorb a small artillery shell, and the bulletproof windows were so thick they turned the outside world blue.

The little convoy headed up Table Mesa Drive and turned left onto Broadway, the old Highway 93, past the refugee-processing center on the University of Colorado campus. Holle saw threads of campfire smoke lifting to the sky from the area of the Pearl Street Mall. Now nineteen years old, she sometimes wished she could have seen cities like this as they had been before she was born, the way they were in
Friends
and
Frasier.
They turned left again onto Arapahoe Avenue, heading west out of the city. Rough wire barriers, already rusting, had been thrown up along the sides of the main roads, for otherwise the highways, now little used by traffic, would have long ago been colonized by the lean-tos and tents of the dispossessed, and the city would have ground to a halt.

As they drove by, Holle saw people pressed up to the fences, rows of faces, children dressed in clothes faded to the color of the mud, or the gray of the overcast December sky. Kelly Kenzie had the nerve to wave a gloved hand. The Candidates were still celebrities. A couple of children waved back. But the adults stared back, as if the Candidates in their environment suits were visitors from some other star. Some held up improvised placards, a single name scrawled on bits of card or plastic or cloth: VASQUEZ. After withdrawing from the 2036 election former President Vasquez had become an outspoken champion of the nation’s dispossessed. Conspiracy theories had been proliferating since Vasquez’s assassination in her home, just a week ago.

There had recently been a new influx of eye-dees. When the sea-level rise had topped twelve hundred meters the flood had at last started to impinge on Colorado itself in a serious way. The waters had got as far as Burlington on the I-70 and Lamar on the I-50, and the great rivers, the South Platte and the Arkansas, were now tidal in their lower reaches. There was salt-poisoning in the aquifers, and, it was said, of some trees and crops even in Denver. A fresh, panicky relocation was going on, as eye-dees in the sod-house communities on the plains were moved up to the higher, poorer land of Monument Ridge or the Rockies. But anybody who could break out of the official corridors made for the sanctuary of the cities. And meanwhile, some of the Project Nimrod workers were drifting away, making an early claim for a place on the remnant high ground.

The result was all these faces, all anonymous, more and more all the time, and if you listened to their voices you could hear accents that hailed from across America and even from abroad, from South America, Europe, people from all over driven by the flood to wash up against these cold fences. Holle never forgot that if not for a chance of fate, if her father hadn’t been smart or fortunate in the choices he’d made in his life, she could have been on the other side of the fences too. She was relieved when they passed out of the old town limits and the press of faces let up.

They rolled along Canyon Boulevard, a twisting, rock-rimmed track into the mountains. Maybe a dozen kilometers out they came to a community called Boulder Falls, where a twenty-meter cascade spilled onto the rocks. Even here the IDP camps crowded the streets, right up to the hog-wire barrier that protected the road. Don said loudly that some of the eye-dees had to pitch their shanties so close to the waterfall they got sprayed on day and night. He laughed at this, and Kelly snapped at him. Don rarely spoke about his work, but Holle knew he had been reassigned from urban policing duties to border control and IDP processing, and she could guess what that was doing to his soul. But he never showed any bitterness, even when he was forced to spend so much time with the Candidate corps from which he’d been excluded. The bus with its escort rolled through the town without stopping.

The canyon opened out into a wider plain. They were heading for the town of Nederland, and would go further still, up into the mountain country of the Indian Peaks Wilderness.

Holle tried to concentrate on the country outside, and ignore the chafing of her suit. The idea of the sim was to get them used to how they might have to live and work in the first days and months after their landing on Earth II. Their yet-to-be-decided destination was expected to be Earthlike, otherwise there would be no point going there in the first place, enough that you would be able to walk around outdoors without a pressure suit. But you would almost certainly need a sealed environment suit. The partial pressure of oxygen might be too low or too high, there might be various toxins floating around, and even, conceivably, some biohazard that might target your utterly alien system.

But Holle detested her suit. Supposedly manufactured by AxysCorp in its high-tech base in the Andes before it was overrun by rebels, the suit was made of a smart material designed to let her skin sweat normally, while filtering out any pasties from the environment. The mask over her mouth secreted a moisturizer and mild anaesthetic to ease the friction with her skin. There were light packs on her chest and shoulders containing supplies for the suit scrubbers, and fresh water and food. Her goggles were self-cleaning and demisting, which was fine until they broke down.

She ought to be able to survive without replenishment sealed up in this thing for twenty-four hours, and with replenishment indefinitely—the manufacturers’ lower limit was a month. She understood the necessity of learning how to live and work in such conditions. But after a few hours in the suit she always began to feel like a pale, desiccating worm, as the joints chafed and the thing filled up with her own stink. On sim days you had the additional irritation of medical sensors taped to your skin, and the unnerving presence of miniature cameras on your shoulder and helmet—even
inside
your helmet, so your face could be watched at all times.

Most of the Candidates didn’t mind enclosure, or even the continual surveillance. They talked quietly, pulling absently at cramping folds in the suits. They had all been raised in enclosed, heavily monitored environments since they had joined the program, for most of them, for most of their lives. But Holle hoped that Earth II would be benign enough for her to be able to take her gloves and boots off, to soothe her feet in running water and run her fingers through alien soil, and maybe feel the breeze on an exposed cheek.

They passed through Nederland, an old mining camp that had become a hippyish tourist magnet, and then, like everywhere else, a camp and processing center for the dispossessed. They headed on west toward Brainard Lake. From here the views of the Wilderness mountains opened up, and the Candidates leaned toward the bus’s small windows to see. The scenery was spectacular, and it was unusual to take in a view that had no humans in it; these rocky slopes were too steep for the most desperate of refugees to cling to. But the mountains were bare of life, safe for withering trees; the shifting climate zones had made the slopes unviable. Though it was December there was no snow save on the highest slopes. There had been no snow at all in Denver, not for a couple of years.

As they neared the sim site, Holle saw smoke climbing into the air, black and oily. At last they approached what looked like a tangle of wreckage, scattered across a rocky plain.