Kinsella (Kinsella Universe Book 1) (21 page)

“A little timorous, Mr. Malcolm,” Colonel Saunders said.  “We’ve a sufficient baseline now on this High Fan mode of Professor Kinsella’s.  What could we possibly gain?”

“Assurance,” Professor Kinsella said.  “I agree with Pilot Officer Malcolm.  We’ll lose a few hours, but it is always nice to calibrate our models with the best possible information, as early as possible.”

“Don’t you have any faith in your own math?” Colonel Saunders asked, sounding slightly sarcastic.

“I have lots of faith, but, like anyone, I’m also fond of applause.  Hitting our position with nine nines accuracy — that would be spectacular!  Not to mention worthy of applause.  Finding we were on our way to Polaris... well, that would be uncomfortable, but better to find that out a day and half’s travel time from Earth, rather than in ten days.”

They dropped out of where-ever-you-were on High Fan and used the ship’s instruments.  After the third bearing, John heard Professor Kinsella speak softly to herself.  “Now this is interesting!”

He felt a small tremor.  “Are we where we are supposed to be, Professor?”

Herman Schiller, the navigator, answered quickly.  “Yes.”

Stephanie’s answer was more enigmatic.  “More or less.”

“Which is it?” Colonel Saunders asked, a little testy.

“The position estimate is within the error range of where we are,” the astronomer reported.

“We need to make more measurements,” Stephanie told Colonel Saunders.  “The error range Mr. Schiller refers to is slightly more than a light week in diameter, our estimated position is nearly that large.  That’s about one percent of the distance we’ve come so far.  Colonel, on a flight from San Francisco, about 2500 air miles, a one percent error is 25 miles.  Not a problem.  We are going a lot further than that.  We had planned to emerge from fan a light day above the plane of the ecliptic.

“With error bars this size, we could emerge anywhere in the vicinity of Tau Ceti — including inside the star.”

“What is the difficulty?” the colonel asked.

“Measurement errors,” Stephanie told him.  “With just three data points, we can’t fix our location with sufficient accuracy.  I’d like to take another dozen star fixes.  That should do it.”

“It triples the time we’ll be here!” Herman Schiller said.  “I’m uncomfortable with being this far away from anything and stopping.”

“So am I, Mr. Schiller,” Stephanie told him.  “But the alternative is not to have a clear understanding of the fine details of our flight.  I, for one, wouldn’t want to emerge at Ceti without a better idea of where we’ll be popping out.”

Eventually Stephanie was satisfied and they went uneventfully to High Fan again.  John Malcolm cornered the Professor a little later.  “Did I earn any brownie points?”

She frowned at him and then laughed.  “Mr. Malcolm!  What an odd notion!  A pilot doing his job, checking his navigation, expecting brownie points!  No, no brownie points for being competent at what you do.  As I said, Mr. Malcolm, it’s your judgment that I have issues with, not your professional competence.”

It was, John thought, a different perspective on things than he’d ever had before.  He’d been a test pilot for years and more than once had something break.  He stayed calm, he stayed cool and he got the busted bird back on the ground and in one piece.  He’d enjoyed the praise, professional and personal, that people had heaped upon him afterwards.

But exactly what was a test pilot paid for, anyway?  Why, that was to take the bird out and find out if it was working right.  And if it busted, you were supposed to bring it back.

He laughed at himself.  What he should have done was refused the adulation, yawned and said, “Ho-hum, just part of the job!”

“I see wheels turning, Mr. Malcolm,” Stephanie told him.

“I know it’s a little late, but I think I’m growing up.”

She smiled at him.  “When I was eight my parents insisted I learn the violin.  All child prodigies can play the violin, they assured me.

“Well, I stink playing any musical instrument.  I have no sense of rhythm and I have a lousy ear for pitch.  Still, at my first recital everyone stood and clapped for me.  I forgot about all my mistakes and bowed and smiled and felt wonderful.

“When we got home, my father ripped me up one side and down the other, over the protests of my mother.  He explained in exquisite detail all the things I’d done wrong; things I knew I’d done wrong.  I’d mistaken polite applause for the real thing, you see.  I recognized my limitations with the violin and went on to other things.  I’ve never let applause affect me again.”

“And I have.  I will do better, Professor.”

“All I ask, Mr. Malcolm, is that you do your job.  I’ve never had problems with the way you do that.  It’s when you look around you and decide things over and above your job that you become dangerous.”

Ten days later the
Ad Astra
dropped from High Fan once again.  There were quick reports from the various departments.  They were less than ten thousand kilometers from the estimated position of their emergence.  A fine, fine piece of navigation and everyone praised Mr. Schiller for it.

John Malcolm watched Professor Kinsella, who was sitting next to the coffee service table.  He knew for a fact that they’d slightly modified their course at the stop, slightly modified the time they would come off High Fan.  Mr. Schiller had plugged the numbers into his computer and they’d arrived at the right place.

And without his own input, without Stephanie Kinsella’s insistence on refining the data, they would still have been safe, but it wouldn’t have been very elegant navigation.

A day later they were in orbit above the planet, with every instrument they possessed poking and prodding the planet below.  The meeting at the end of the day was, John thought, the most important one of the flight.

The funniest thing was Professor Kinsella.  She showed up in jeans and a t-shirt, like she usually did.  What was funny was the t-shirt with the whirlpool galaxy and the little arrow.  But instead of the original line “You are Here” and an arrow, now there was a caret and the words “No Longer” inserted before “Here.”

Colonel Saunders kicked off the meeting, then had each science department head speak.  It was Dr. Rampling who upset the steady progress of the meeting.

“We have to go down at once,” she told Colonel Saunders and the general.  “We know that the green we see down there is spectrographically identical to the types of chlorophyll we have on Earth.  We need to get down and take samples soonest.”

The general smiled politely.  “First, we need to determine a good landing location, then we need to determine if it’s safe, land and take more readings before it will be safe for the scientists to exit the spacecraft.”

“Nuts!” Dr. Rampling said.  “That’s just nuts.  We have a limited time here, General.  Every minute we’re up here, we’re not down there.  We can’t take pictures of plants or animals from up here, General.  We can’t take samples, we can’t run tests.”

“You can run tests on the way home, Professor,” the general said genially.

“We need to get quick results to give us a clue what to sample next, give us some direction.  Every minute we delay getting down means that we lose data; it’s as simple as that.”

“We can’t risk the ship or crew,” he told her.

“General, I have a suggestion,” Stephanie interrupted.  “Perhaps it would help the determination if we picked a candidate landing site and then checked it.

“This spot here,” she stood and walked to one of the maps of the surface of the planet that had been produced.  “This spot is interesting.  It’s a broad river valley, complete with terraces.  There’s what is likely a freshwater lake, with what appears to be heavier vegetation to the north and west of it, and grasslands east and south.  We can land in the lake.”

Someone else said, “I’d sure like to get a look at the ocean.”

Stephanie spoke right up.  “I agree, but the ocean is more problematical.  This planet has a slightly higher occurrence of iron and other heavy metals than we’re used to.  I’d like to get controlled readings of what’s in the ocean before we land in it.  Heavy metals don’t respond to decontamination efforts as well as bacteria and other living things.”

There was more discussion, but it was clear that most of the scientists agreed with Stephanie that the first place she’d mentioned was as good as any.  And they all wanted to be on the ground.

“The problem with your lake, Professor,” the general said, “is that we have no idea how deep the lake is.  There is simply no way we can tell if it is safe.  Better, the deep ocean, I think.”

Stephanie smiled slightly.  “There are a number of places in the ocean where the water suddenly shallows.  We call these banks or islands.  We can send down a shuttle with a few Marines.  The shuttle lands in the lake and uses sonar to determine the depth.  They look around and get a feel for any immediate threats.  By look around, I mean with the shuttle’s cameras, not by getting out and wandering around.  Then they come back.”

“Contamination?” the general asked.

“They lift at one g,” Stephanie told him.  “By the time they get out of the atmosphere, they’ll be going several kilometers a second.  Even though the hull is smooth, the hull temperature will go up to a thousand degrees C or so.  This was all in your briefing papers, sir.”

“I want to keep an open mind,” he told her, a smile on his face.

His eyes went to the map and it was clear he was weighing options.  “We’ll do as Professor Kinsella and the other scientists suggest.  Major Howland, pick a flight-qualified shuttle crew from the Marines.  Have them land in that lake and evaluate it.”

The Marines landed, they reported the center of the lake was uniformly several hundred meters deep, they presented videotape of plants and a few small animals that their cameras had caught.  The next day, a little after dawn, local time, the
Ad Astra
landed gently on the lake.

In a few minutes the starship was lightly aground not far from the lake’s outlet.

Colonel Saunders spoke to the first party to go outside.  “The air temperature is about 30 degrees Celsius; balmy, in other words.  The water has bacteria, protozoa, and multi-cellular animals.  The air has bacteria and particulate matter.  There are, the virology department tells me, certainly viruses out there.  There are several sorts of fish in the lake, none bigger than a trout and we’ve detected no schools.  Don’t go in the water.

“On land we’ve seen something that looks like a frog version of a dog, or at least a collie-sized version of a frog.  The consensus is that it’s likely a predator.  Watch for it!  Since we’re an unknown quantity and since it lacks several hundred million years of evolution that animals on Earth have had, it might not recognize that you’re something that should be left alone.  That is, the animals may try to eat you.

“Stay in your environmental suits.  We know there are all kinds of bugs out there.  There is a protocol for someone who gets contaminated.  It won’t be pleasant and involves extensive periods of solitary confinement.  Don’t do it!  Be careful out there!”

A few minutes before the first shuttle was going to ferry a shore party to dry land, Stephanie buttonholed the general.  “Sir, I want to remind you of what the President said in our meeting concerning landing protocols,” she told him.

He looked at her and smiled.  “Professor, he’s there.  I’m here, on the scene.  What I say when we land is up to me.”

“No problem, General!  Feel free!  I was thrilled by your speech when we landed on Mars about a giant first step for mankind!  Gosh, that was so original!

“The President was quite clear, sir.  You are not to claim this planet for the United States.”

“We’re the first ones here,” the general told her, confirming her worst fears.  “It comes with the territory.”

“Sir, the President is trying to put together a mechanism, an orderly mechanism, for determining off-world sovereignty. It’s not your prerogative to second guess him.”

“I command, Miss Kinsella, not you.  I will exercise due judgment and do what is in the best interests of the United States.”

Stephanie pulled a piece of paper from her jeans and presented it to him.  “A note, sir, from the President.  In this event.”

The general read it and sniffed.  “An obvious fake.”

“Sir, the President told you to your face what his wishes were.  I’m recording this conversation.  You were told then what to do, you were given written instructions from the President what to do when we disembark, and now you’ve read another direct order about what you are to do.  Sir, the President couched his orders in the strongest possible terms.  This note is a reiteration of those terms.  I suggest, sir, that you’ll look bad ignoring all those iterations.”

“If I return after having led the first successful interstellar expedition, the President isn’t going to court-martial me because I claimed the planet for the United States.  Congress would have his head on a platter!”

“That may be, General, but you have to consider where exactly the Congress of the United States exists in your chain of command: to wit, it’s not there.