Launch Pad (32 page)

O O O

The return to the examining room was as clean and quick as before. Dr. Wells stood before me, a worried frown on his face. “Mr. Schaeffer? Can you hear me?”

For a moment, I could not answer. The memory hung dazzlingly before my eyes, like an after-image of the sun. I wondered how I could have forgotten something like that.

Truth was, I hadn’t forgotten it. It had always been with me.

I looked at Dr. Wells. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

His frown vanished, replaced by a faint smile, an odd certainty. “All right. Tell me about it.”

“I—” I began, and then stopped. I didn’t know what to say.

“It wasn’t fear at all, was it?” he asked.

I shook my head with something like wonder. “It was … exhilaration.”

He nodded approvingly.

“You knew!”

“I suspected. It made sense. It fit in perfectly with your personality. No rules, no absolutes …”

“Infinite possibilities.”

“Yes,” he said. “You know, you’re a lucky person. You’ve lived your entire life in an exploration of that vision. Not everyone gets that chance.”

What I felt at that moment is difficult to describe. The dark place was again dark, but I no longer feared it. It had taken me into danger again and again, to the moons of Saturn and back. It had made me a hero to some. But it wasn’t some outside, alien force, it was me. It is me, to this day.

Dr. Wells stood. “I believe I’ll call the ISC,” he said, grinning, “and let them know they have the right person for the job.”

“Thanks, doc,” I said, extending a hand. “For everything.”

He shook it firmly. “Good luck with the flight … Captain. It’s a long trip.”

I smiled. “I’ve been on longer.”

***

Spectromancy

By Jody Lynn Nye

A blue, spiral-shaped icon lit up at the bottom of Captain Doug Farren’s computer screen. The stocky, crop-haired mission commander of the Verley Colonization Project shiftedaway from the manuscript file of the thriller he was writing while his own data were compiling, and touched the blinking marker. The station computer program had finished analyzing the information Direct Asynchronous Transfer via Laser to Orbital Wavelength sent from the latest Landis probe to report in. Out of a host of thirty robotic spacecraft launched five years before, twelve had already reported, some with good news, some with bad. He ran down the DATLOW report, compared it against the open file on his screen, and swore under his breath. He had been in the Terran Navy, but even his training in invective didn’t furnish him with enough vocabulary to express his feelings. The new input confirmed the data shown in the original analysis of the original spectroscopic charts of Verley 247, but with bells on.

“Unbelievable. How did she do that?”

He clipped out the corresponding pieces of data, opened up a communication to Rob Carling, the director of media operations for the Verley project, and squirted the information to him.

The com connected. Carling was a man of approximately Doug’s height and build, but possessed of a handsome black mustache and an enviable tan that no space-dweller, or even most scientists, could boast. Behind him, the furnishings of his luxurious office included a wide high-retina screen, bookshelves and a picture window that looked out over the Pacific Ocean. He glanced up to acknowledge Doug, then down to the data, then up again. His bright blue eyes widened, and the dark lashes at the corners crinkled.

“Again?”

“Again. Landis probe 14 proved it. The correlation is even tighter on this one, and it’s less than 25 light years from Earth. Planet c is a great prospect. It’s that mega-Jupiter with four rocky worlds orbiting in exactly the right zone around a nice, stable little red dwarf. According to the probe, its biggest moon has the breathable atmosphere, if about three degrees Celsius cooler than perfect. It’s got at least one major ocean, salt water, weather, and no life above a microbe yet. No radio emissions in any frequency. I have no idea how she could possibly have known it, when no one else deduced it, but all the subsequent research agrees, and now the probe confirms it.”

“Maybe she sees it in her crystal ball. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Some kind of spectromancy?”

“Don’t even joke about that!” Doug said firmly. He looked up at the plain white ceiling. “Transcript, delete Rob’s last statement.”

“Aye, sir,” the robotic voice of the automated system.

“Look,” Doug said. “The data are accurate. That’s all that matters, not who made the original catch.”

“Calm down, Doug. No one can hear you but me. Everything is going great.”

“This is a government circuit, Rob. Everybody is listening. In twenty-five years the public will be able to hear it, too.”

With a wide grin, Rob sat back in his molded lounger and put his arms behind his head.

“In twenty-five years I hope I’m living on another planet, making ‘boy meets alien’ pictures. Isn’t that what this is all about?”

In spite of his worries, Doug grinned back.

“Yeah. Me, too. But I’ll be in a retirement home in Yuba City if we’ve hitched our wagon to the wrong kind of star.”

Rob seemed to contemplate a blissful reverie. His eyes searched the ceiling dreamily.

“It’s a great story, Doug. I could get plenty of coverage all over the world.”

“Not the kind we want! I need answers before the All-Terran Space Agency will launch the mission, and we haven’t got all that much time to steer the decision.”

“Call me. Or do you need me to come up for a conference?”

Doug sighed. The Verley project had a budget for certain number of shuttle transits. He preferred to use them for big announcements and press junkets. Not that Rob couldn’t afford to get up to the telescope platform on his own.

“No, thanks, not right away. I appreciate it. In the meantime, it’s good news. You can release the data to ATSA.”

“Will do.” Rob smiled down at the file on his own screen, then up at Doug. “See you on the other side.”

“Yeah. I hope. See you.”

Doug swept a finger over the relay. The circuit closed, and the scope returned to the two datafiles side by side. Doug drummed on the desk. He was in a bind.

Since the government space programs’ budget had been pretty much toasted by government financial woes in the early 21st century, astronomers had become the bright hope for reestablishing the hope for manned missions outside the solar system. In a fight for survival of scientific research, they made their case to the All-Terran Space Agency that they had to continue to be funded, so they could look for planets outside the solar system onto which the burgeoning population of humanity could expand. Telescopes were far cheaper to build and run than interstellar starships. Once good prospects had been located, the excitement would help with the public relations battle for major funding for a settlement mission.

Even the two-kilometer-long Verley platform, so named in spite of its cylindrical shape, with its array of tethered telescopes and shielded habitat that astronomers could live and interact on, giving one another support and cross-pollinating ideas with data, was a less costly build than any extrasolar project. It recouped about a third of its annual operating expenses by running experiments and observations for other organizations, including colleges, corporations and private enterprises on Earth, Mars, the Moon, and the Haskell Venus stratospheric platform. Verley wasn’t completely self-financing, but the bureaucrats acknowledged that what it did do was better than nothing. One day they hoped they could make use of the astronomers’ observations. For Doug, that day could not come too soon.

The astronomers who lived on board Verley felt it was their mission to carry on with the Kepler program and the important exoplanetary studies that had begun in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. After the great war that had nearly halved the population of Earth came the great reconciliation that had made humanity’s homeworld one nation, renamed Terra. The human race had nearly extinguished itself. With peace had come the inevitable swell in births. On social networks and traditional news outlets, people began to talk about settling other worlds, so as not to have all the eggs in one basket, so to speak. But where would they find those worlds?

Astronomers were the gatekeepers who could find that desirable real-estate, in nice neighborhoods. The original legislator who argued on behalf of the Verley was married to a billion-dollar real estate agent, and used all the wiles of his spouse to sell it. Funding was found, though not without a lot of arm-twisting and horse-trading. The platform was launched six years later, and assumed a heliocentric orbit, much like the Kepler telescope of the 21st century. Four telescopes, tethered to the main cylinder, scanned a different spectrum: visual, infrared, X-ray and radio wave. Scientists applied from all over Earth, the Haskell platform, and the Moon colony to work there. A few dozen were chosen, along with support staff, engineers, interns and students. Doug was hired to herd this particular group of cats, and the scanning began.

Once positive data had started to come in via the telescopes and spectrographs, ATSA realized they needed boots on the ground, or rather treads, to examine their assertions that certain worlds were candidates. Rob had come on board as the publicity officer at the same time Doug was commissioned as project manager. He helped them design the advertising campaign for the Landis probes. It was a wild success, and funding from most of the member states poured in to the Turzillo Enterprises, Inc. plant, where the probes were built.

Twenty of the small mobile laboratories were launched, with enormous fanfare, from twenty different spots on the globe. Nine had returned data so far, some of it enormously promising. Humanity once again had something to look forward to. Scientists and astronauts, on the other hand, knew the odds of locating even one livable planet were ridiculously small.

A lot of “ifs” figured into the calculations. If the astronomers could find habitable worlds, if any of these had no sign of intelligent life that humanity would be displacing, or cohabiting with, and, if, very much if it was within reach of the technology that Terra had at its disposal, the worldwide government might devote some of its very limited resources to a colonization mission. No other kind of mission was really considered practical. Even after the discovery of the Brotherton wormholes a couple of light years out in space in the direction of the Leo II cluster, a round-trip mission wasn’t much more than glorified tourism. It would take a big, big project to get a space program back to the glory days of the late 20th century, when astronauts, cosmonauts and even taikonauts were celebrities.

Astronomers, not usually the magnificent, photogenic, top physical specimens who undertook dangerous, life-threatening missions, just didn’t attract the right kind of publicity. What they did took a long time, even if they did it better than anyone else in the world, was boring to anyone not of a similar mindset, and frankly was galactically far beyond the intelligence level of most of the general public to comprehend. In fact, as far as the public was concerned, scientists were anonymous Poindexters in white lab coats that came up with cool things out of the blue. No one carried around photos of astronomers on the lock screens of their smartpads.

To be fair, most of the scientists preferred it that way. They hated having their data scrutinized and criticized by non-specialists before they had determined just exactly what it was they had found. Farren likened it to kids hanging over his shoulder demanding, “Are we there yet?” while he drove. No publicity was good publicity, until they were ready to make an announcement, preferably of good news.

But the news had been good. They had found places suitable for settlers to live. The project would go forward. It didn’t matter that all the places that worked out as habitable but uninhabited had started as Christie Yant’s findings. All had been checked by collaborating astronomers and other more comprehensive remote investigation even before the Landis probes had gone out. So, there was no problem that he could see.

Doug was proud of everyone on the Verley platform who had brought the project this far. The little jealousies normal among academics had been set aside because he considered the whole team responsible for the success. They had come home with the prize. Theirs was the first step. Now it was time for others to take the second.

The fifth successful probe meant the brass had plenty of prospects to choose from, even before the rest reported back. The problem now, as he saw it, was what teams to send where. The ATSA hierarchy was split into several factions. There were the “eggs in one basket” fans, who wanted all three of the colonization teams now preparing and training to settle on one exoplanet; the “spread the risk” cheerleaders, who wanted three different colonies; and the “let’s not do anything until the aliens come looking for us” nay-sayers. But Doug dismissed the third faction. One way or another, there would be a mission. In his opinion, that called for a celebration.

O O O

Ten days later, the whole team gathered for a rare party in the cafeteria. The dining hall was one of the largest rooms on the station. Because of the curvature of the vessel, the ceiling and floor sloped slightly down and away to either side from the center where Doug sat in front of the enormous high-retina screen. It was a tribute to the singleminded nature of the scientists on board that the accommodations were of a basic, though comfortable nature, except for the technology. That was of top quality and the latest models.

The astronomers, plus his or her graduate students, a few visitors, and the support staff waited excitedly for the big announcement from ATSA. Professor Farah Mendlesohn of Cambridge University, she of the pre-Raphaelite tresses, specialized not specifically in astronomy but the astrophysical technology that created and ran the scopes. Her student contingent was the largest. They hung on her words and ran to make sure her tea was hot. Dr. Tiffany Trent, whose warm auburn locks matched her personality, another observational scientist whose specialty was Oort cloud analysis, all from the top of their classes at Terran and Martian universities. Dr. Conrad Barlow, doyen of the X-ray telescope, glowering from among his coterie of terrified grad students, never looked like he was happy to be there, but hated to be left out of anything. The heavy brow ridges under a receding hairline seemed made for expressing disapproval. Dr. Jake Kerr, big, burly and bald, studied multiple-star complexes like binaries, trinaries and dodecanaries, maybe the most popular professor on the station. He had a sideline in writing humorous stories for the online magazines. Professor Amir bin-Alam was the newest addition to the team. His ambition made everyone else feel as if they were slackers living in their mothers’ basements. And neon-haired Dr. Christie Yant, their own celebrity. Not only had she been a devoted amateur astronomer since childhood, she was the only one of the professors on board who had no student debt whatsoever, a result of her popular sideline. Doug had to admit he envied her success. Most of the senior astronomers on board were published authors, but she far outshone the others.

In Christie’s youth, which was not far behind her, she had become interested in astronomy, but like most kids, had no money to buy her own telescope. She had also discovered, by reading many books and online texts, that the ancient Terrans, through their studies of the stars, believed that what happened in heaven affected their lives directly. In other words, astrology. A perusal of the Internet libraries turned up thousands of astrology books, many of them written by people who, secretly, were as skeptical of the pseudoscience as she was. There was money to be made from it. Money that could buy telescopes and cameras and access to star chart databases.

So, Christie took the trigonometry she used to chart the movement of the stars to cast horoscopes for her friends. Then, for friends of friends. Then, for clients who had heard about her. She had natural intuition and plenty of research material available on the Internet to “interpret” the charts. Once she got bored with astrology, she moved on to studying other forms of divination, such as palm reading, Tarot, and crystals.